National Broadband Plan - Public safety communications

Currently, public safety has no ability to use broadband communications on a day-to-day or emergency basis on a network that meets their requirements. The networks are very fragmented, so emergency responders aren't able often to talk to one another across jurisdictions or across geographies. You wouldn't put out a separate interstate highway system for police cars and fire trucks. It doesn't make sense in the 21st Century to make separate, totally separate radio systems for public safety. We have a blueprint for setting up something called the ERIC - the Emergency Reliability and Interoperability Center, which will be an FCC entity that will se thte standards and specifications so we can have a nationwide broadband network. We wanted the officer in New York to be able to go to California and help California out, and be able to use his device there. The sorts of things that are available now in terms of remote diagnostics. So if an EMT comes to your house and you're having a cardiac event. The information that could be sent to the doctor at the hospital, who could then talk to the EMT on the scene, really can save a life. In terms of Next-generation 9-1-1 and emergency alerting, on the 9-1-1 side, we re still in a very early timeframe. One of the most interesting things was, in the plan, was the fact that less than 50 percent of 9-1-1 call centers event have connectivity to broadband. That means the folks who work at these centers can't even do a yahoo search, or a google search, whoever your favorite provider is, to look something up. Much less recieve even text messages. If would be great if you were at the scene of a fire, and you could take a picture, send that to the 9-1-1 center, and they could forward that information on to an emergecny responder. You may remember from when you were a child on the TV stations, there would be a beep, and they would say - this is a test of the emerrgency broadcast system - and that's using broadcast technologies, it's a ver effective means of communication. But all of a sudden with broadband there's new and novel ways in which you can reach out to the public to warn them of things like weather, or other disasters or other emergency situations. If you think about the Amber Alerts that we have today, wouldn't it be more effective if they could actually show you the face of the child who is missing, or the picture of the car in a real time basis.