Every summer, thousands of people travel to western Indiana for the Terre Haute airshow—a two-day event that features the Navy’s famous Blue Angels and other aircraft. At the 2018 event, planning officials decided to deploy FirstNet to provide a robust interoperable broadband connection for all involved.

Edward Parkinson describes how he joined the Western Fire Chiefs Association and public safety officials for a site visit to the burn area of the Camp Fire in northern California. This trip was an opportunity for the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet Authority) to learn about the public safety response to the fires that devastated Paradise, California—a town of 27,000 residents in the foothills East of Chico—directly from those fire chiefs and other first responders who were on the ground during the wildfire.

The December 2018 quarterly Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) meetings in Sorrento, Italy, addressed standards in several areas relevant to mission-critical broadband in three separate plenary group meetings.

The age of FirstNet stands to deliver situational awareness and data for Emergency Operation Centers (EOCs), whether for emergency managers in rural or metro areas in the US. When police needed to search a 300-acre wooded property in rural Alabama, they used a mix of traditional police work and cutting-edge technology to try to find evidence that could provide a long-sought break in a missing persons case.

In 2018, the Life is Beautiful Music and Art Festival attracted 180,000 visitors from around the globe to an 18-block radius in Las Vegas, Nevada. To assist, 30 FirstNet Ready™ mobile devices were distributed to the Las Vegas Fire and Rescue team, including firefighters, EMS, and bomb squad personnel.