Spectrum Considerations for US Public Safety

Since the inception of mobile radio, Public Safety agencies have relied on wireless communication systems to coordinate day-to-day and emergency operations. The decentralized and autonomous nature of the various public safety agencies in the US has led to deployment of a variety of systems operating in fragmented spectrum ranging from lower VHF to upper UHF. Because of the narrow-band technologies used in public safety communications systems, public safety agencies have been limited primarily to voice services and low-speed data transfer on their private networks. In contrast, the commercial cellular sector now offers a large portfolio of services that include voice, messaging, email, web browsing, picture transfer, video streaming and other wideband services. In this paper, we describe some of the factors driving the expansion of spectrum allocated to public safety agencies.