>> From the Palace of Fine Arts
in San Francisco,
it's theCUBE,
covering AT&T Spark.
Now here's Jeff Frick.
>> Hey welcome back everybody,
Jeff Frick here with theCUBE.
We're at San Francisco,
at the historic Palace of Fine Arts,
it's a beautiful spot, it's redone,
they moved Exploratorium out a couple years ago,
so now it's in a really nice event space,
and we're here for the AT&T Spark Event,
and the conversation's all around 5G.
But we're excited to have our first guest,
and he's working on something that's
a little bit tangential to 5G-related,
but not absolutely connected, but really important work,
it's Chris Sambar,
he is the SVP of FirstNet at AT&T,
Chris, great to see you.
>> Thanks Jeff, great to be here, I appreciate it.
>> Yeah, so you had a nice Keynote Presentation,
talking about FirstNet.
So for people I've missed,
that aren't familiar, what is AT&T FirstNet?
>> Sure, I'll give a quick background.
As I was mentioning up there,
tomorrow is the 17-year Anniversary of 9/11.
So 17 years ago tomorrow,
a big problem in New York City.
Lots of first responders descended on the area.
All of them were trying to communicate with each other,
they were trying to use their radios,
which they're you know,
typically what you see a first responder using,
the wireless networks in the area.
Unfortunately challenges, it wasn't working.
They were having trouble communicating with each other,
their existing wireless networks
were getting congested,
and so the 9/11 Commission came out
with a report years later,
and they said we need a dedicated communications network,
just for First Responders.
So they spun all this up and they said,
we're going to dedicate some Spectrum,
20 megahertz of D-Class Spectrum,
which is really prime Spectrum.
Seven billion dollars and we're going to set up
this Federal entity, called the FirstNet Authority,
and they're going to create a Public Safety Network
across America.
So FirstNet Authority spent a few years
figuring out how to do it,
and they landed on what we have today,
which was a Public/Private Partnership,
between AT&T, and Public Safety throughout America,
and we're building them a terrific network
across the country.
It is literally a separate network so when I,
I think of wireless in America,
I think of four main commercial carriers,
AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint.
This is the 5th carrier,
this is Public Safety's Wireless Network just for them.
>> So when you say an extra network,
so it's a completely separate,
obviously you're leveraging infrastructure,
like towers and power and those types of things.
But it's a completely separate network,
than the existing four that you mentioned.
>> Yeah, so if you walk into our data centers
throughout the country,
you're going to see separate hardware,
physical infrastructure that is just for FirstNet,
that's the core network just for this network.
On the RAN, the Radio Access Network,
we've got antennas that have Band 14 on them,
that's Public Safety's Band,
dedicated just for them when they need it.
So yeah, it's literally a physically separate network.
The SIM card that goes into a FirstNet device,
is a different SIM card
than our commercial users would use,
because it's separate.
>> So one of the really interesting things about 5G,
and kind of the evolution of wireless is,
is taking some of the load that has been taken
by like WiFi, and other options
for fast, always on connectivity.
I would assume radio,
and I don't know that much about radio frequencies
that have been around forever with communications in,
in First Responders.
Is the vision that the 5G will eventually
take over that type of communication as well?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
If you look at the evolution of First Responder,
and Public Safety Communications,
for many years now they've used radios.
Relatively small, narrow Spectrum bands
for Narrow Band Voice, right, just voice communications.
It really doesn't do data,
maybe a little bit, but really not much.
Now they're going to expand to this Spectrum,
the D-Class, the D-Block Spectrum, excuse me,
which is 700 megahertz, it's a low-band Spectrum,
that'll provide them with Dedicated Spectrum,
and then the next step, as you say, is 5G,
so take the load off as Public Safety
comes into the,
the new Public Safety Communications space,
that they've really been wanting for years and years,
they'll start to utilize 5G as well on our network.
>> So where are you on the development of FirstNet,
where are you on the rollout,
what's the sequence of events?
>> The first thing we did,
the award was last year in March 2017.
The first thing we did was we built out the core network.
When I talked about all that physical infrastructure,
that basically took a year to build out,
and it was pretty extensive,
and about a half a billion dollars so,
that was the first thing we did,
that completed earlier this year.
>> Was that nationwide or major metro cities or how--
>> Nationwide, everywhere in the country.
>> Nationwide, okay.
>> So now what we're doing is,
we are putting the Spectrum that we were given,
or I should say we were leased for 25 years,
we're putting that Spectrum up across our towers
all over the country so,
that will take five years, it's a five-year build-out,
tens of thousands of towers across America,
will get this Public Safety Spectrum,
for Public Safety, and for their use.
>> Right.
Will you target by GEO, by Metro area,
I mean, how's it going to actually happen?
That's a huge global rollout, five years is a long time.
How you kind of prioritize,
how are you really going to market with this?
>> The Band 14 Spectrum is being rolled out in the major,
the major dense areas across the country.
I will tell you that by the end of the rollout,
five years from now, 99% of the population of America,
will have Band 14 Spectrum,
so the vast majority of the population.
Other areas where we don't roll it out,
rural areas for example,
all of the features that Public Safety wants,
we call them (mumbles) and priority,
which is the features to allow them
to always have access to the network whenever they need it.
Those features will be on our regular commercial Spectrum.
So if Band 14 isn't there,
the network will function
exactly as if it were there for them.
>> Right.
Then how do you roll it out to the agencies,
all the First Responders, the Fire, the Police,
the EMTs, et cetera?
How do they start to take advantage of this opportunity?
>> Sure, so we started that earlier this year.
We really started in a March-April timeframe in earnest,
signing up agencies, and the uptake's been phenomenal.
It's over 2500 Public Safety Agencies across America,
over 150,00, and that number grows by thousands every week.
That's actually a pretty old number but,
they are signing up in droves.
In fact, one of the problems we were having initially is,
handling the volume of First Responders
that wanted to sign up,
and the reason is they're seeing that,
whether it's a fire out in Oregon,
and they need connectivity in the middle of nowhere,
in a forest where there's no wireless connectivity at all,
we'll bring a vehicle out there,
put up an antenna and provide them connectivity.
Whether it's a Fourth of July show, or a parade,
or an active shooter,
wherever large groups of people,
combined together and the network gets congested,
they're seeing that wow,
my device works no matter what.
I can always send a text message,
I can send a video, it just works.
Where it didn't work before.
So they love it, and they're really,
they're really signing up in droves, it's great.
>> It's really interesting because it's,
it's interesting that this was triggered,
as part of the post 9/11 activity to make things better,
and make things safer.
But there was a lot of buzz,
especially out here in the West with,
with First Responders in the news,
who were running out of band width.
As you said, the Firefighters,
the fire's been burning out here,
it seems like forever,
and really nobody thinking about those,
or obviously they're probably roaming
on their traditional data plan,
and they're probably out there,
for weeks and weeks at a time,
that wasn't part of their allocation,
when they figured out what plan they should be.
So the timing is pretty significant,
and there's clearly a big demand for this.
>> Absolutely.
So that example that you sight is a really good one.
Two weeks ago, there was a lot in the news
about a fire agency in the West,
that said they were throttled by their carrier.
It was a commercial carrier,
and commercial carriers have terms and conditions,
that sometimes they need to throttle usage,
if you get to a certain level.
That's how commercial networks work.
>> Right, right.
>> FirstNet was built with not only different technology,
hardware, software,
but with different terms and conditions.
Because we understand that,
when a First Responder responds to your house,
we don't want that to be the minute in time,
when their network,
their plan got maxed out,
and now they're getting throttled.
>> Right.
>> So we don't have any throttling
on the FirstNet Network.
So it's not only the hardware, software,
technical aspects of the network,
but the terms and conditions are different.
It's what you would expect that a First Responder
would have and want on their device,
and that's what we're providing for them.
>> Right, and the other cool thing that you mentioned is,
we see it all the time, we go to a lot of conferences.
A lot of people probably experience it at,
at big events right, is that
still today, WiFi and traditional LTE,
has hard times in super-dense environments,
where there's just tons and tons and tons of
bodies I imagine, absorbing all that signal,
as much as anything else,
so to have a separate Spectrum
in those type of environments
which are usually chaotic
when you got First Responders,
or some of these mass events that you outlined,
is a pretty important feature,
to not get just completely wiped out by
everybody else happening to be there at the same time.
>> Exactly.
I'll give you two quick examples,
that'll illustrate what you just said.
The first one is,
on the Fourth of July, in downtown Washington D.C.
You can imagine that show.
It's an awesome show,
but there are hundreds of thousands of people
that gather around that Washington Monument,
to watch the show.
And the expectation is at the peak of the show,
when all those people are there,
you're not really going to be sending text messages,
or calling people,
the network's probably just not going to work very well.
That's, we've all gotten used to that.
>> Right, right.
>> This year, I had First Responders,
who were there during the event,
sending me videos of the fireworks going off.
Something that never would've been possible before,
and them saying oh my gosh.
The actually works the way it's supposed to work,
we can use our phones.
Then the second example, which is a really sad example.
There was a recent school shooting down in Florida.
You had Sheriffs, Local Police, Ambulances.
You even had some Federal Authorities that showed up.
They couldn't communicate with each other,
because they were on different radio networks.
Imagine if they had that capability of FirstNet,
where they could communicate with each other,
and the network worked,
even though there were thousands of people
that were gathering around that scene,
to see what was going on.
So that's the capability we're bringing to Public Safety,
and it's really good for all of us.
>> Do you see that this is kind of the,
the aggregator of the multi-disparate systems
that exist now, as you mentioned in,
in your Keynote, and again there's different agencies,
they've got different frequencies,
they've got Police, Fire, Ambulance, Federal Agencies,
that now potentially this,
as just kind of a unified First Responder network,
becomes the defacto way,
that I can get in touch with anyone regardless of
of where they come from, or who they're associated with?
>> That is exactly the vision of FirstNet.
In major cities across America,
Police, Fire, Emergency Medical typically,
are on three different radio networks,
and it's very difficult for them
to communicate with each other.
They may have a shared frequency or two between them,
but it's very challenging for them.
Our goal is to sign all of them up,
put them on one LTE network, the FirstNet Network,
customized for them,
so they can all communicate with each other,
regardless of how much congestion is on the network.
So that's the vision of FirstNet.
>> Then that's even before you get into the 5G impacts,
which will be the data impacts,
whereas I think again, you showed in some of your examples,
the enhanced amount of data that they can bring to bear,
on solving a problem,
whether it's a layout of a building
for the Fire Department or drone footage from up above.
We talked to Menlo Park Fire,
they're using drones more and more to give
eyes over the fire to the guys down on the ground.
So there's a lot of really interesting applications
that you can get more better data,
to drive more better applications through that network,
to help these guys do their job.
>> Yeah, you've got it, the smart city's cameras,
don't you want that to be able to stream over the network,
and give it to First Responders,
so they know what they're going to encounter,
when they show up to the scene of
whatever issue's going on in the city,
of course you do,
and you need a really reliable, stable network
to provide that on.
>> Well Chris, this is not only an interesting work,
but very noble, and an important work,
so appreciate all of the efforts
that you're putting in,
and thanks for stopping by.
>> I appreciate it Jeff, it's been great talking with you.
>> Alright, he's Chris, I'm Jeff,
you're watching theCUBE,
we're in San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts,
at AT&T Spark.
Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.
(bright music)