[T]elecom giant AT&T is promising to cover 95 percent of Vermont by year five of a 25-year project called FirstNet to enhance broadband communications for first responders.
But at a special meeting of the House Energy and Technology Committee on Friday, a company official cited minimum speeds for the FirstNet system that fall far short of the Federal Communications Commission’s definition of broadband issued in 2015.
Owen M. Smith Jr., AT&T’s Maine-based regional vice president for external affairs, told the committee the agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce-affiliated FirstNet program called for minimum broadband speeds allowing downloads of 768 kilobits per second and uploads of 256 kilobits per second.
In 2015, the FCC said its minimum definition of broadband called for downloads of 25 megabits per second — more than 32 times the FirstNet minimum and uploads of 3 megabits per second — nearly 12 times the FirstNet minimum.
The revelation did not draw a big reaction from committee members delving into an important decision Gov. Phil Scott must make by the end of the year: whether to sign onto an agreement calling for AT&T to be the telecom provider for the FirstNet program, or whether Vermont should “opt out,” take up to $25 million in federal grant money, and find its own vendor to build out public safety broadband.
A wireless telecom consultant who was one of more than 35 people attending Friday’s session said the minimum FirstNet speeds would “barely” be enough to complete a cellular phone call.
Modern emergency services frequently use video technology so dispatchers can have, for example, sometimes crucial information about which door of a building a firefighter is entering. By the time a video transmitted over a system with FirstNet’s threshold speeds, however, the firefighter might have made his or her way to another part of the building, the consultant said.
Terry LaValley, chairman of the Vermont Public Safety Broadband Commission, which is preparing to make a recommendation to Scott by mid-November, said the threshold speeds are minimums and he hopes for improvement over time.
“The law that established FirstNet specified that the network shall be based on the minimum technical requirements on the commercial standards for LTE (cellular) service,” LaValley said. “The speeds we discussed are based on this premise.”
“The speeds are a minimum which may or may not support a voice call,” he said, but would allow sending and receiving texts.
Smith of AT&T argued it wasn’t fair to make an issue about FirstNet’s minimum speeds because the company easily exceeds them now and would in most instances as it builds out the public safety broadband network.
But Stephen Whitaker, a critic of the state’s telecom programs who testified at Friday’s session, said the gap between the FirstNet minimum upload speed of 256 kbps and the FCC minimum of 3 mbps leaves too much wiggle room “when the lives of our first responders may be at stake.”
