Episode 98 - Live at 5x5: Using broadband LTE to augment LMR

Narrator: You're listening to Public Safety First, a podcast to help you learn about the First Responder Network Authority and how you can be part of the future of public safety technology. 

And now, your host. 

Sheriff Michael Adkinson: I'm Mike Adkinson. I'm a FirstNet Authority board member. I'm the current sheriff in Walton County, Florida, which is in the panhandle of Florida. A little unique in that I also represent professional fire, professional EMS, air medical, combined communications, as well as animal control and emergency management. So we like to do a little bit of everything at the sheriff's office, right? This to me, this particular breakout session is where the rubber meets the road, which is how the application of technology and the use of these technologies are actually operationalized. I'm going to give you just a quick analogy, if you don't mind, because I think this is important. Many of you may be familiar that what happens in a lot of the world is you develop a piece of technology, right? Whatever that may be. Certainly, if you're in engineering, you have an engineering type mindset, right? And you look at it as a systems analysis way to do business. But that's not always the way we use technology. And there can be a fundamental breakdown between the operationalization and the design phase. And I think what you're going to hear today from members of our board, I'm going to introduce Jesse Cooper. Is that the way we're actually going to use these technologies may exceed what your original design was. And there may be other case studies for how you do this. And I think that's where our opportunity exists is how are we actually going to use this. And so for that, Mr. Cooper, I'm going to turn it over to you. 

Jesse Cooper: Thanks Sheriff. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Jesse Cooper. I'm with the FirstNet Authority. As the sheriff mentioned, we're here to talk about the use of LMR and LTE augmentation and how that goes together. We know LMR systems are critical to public safety. They've been critical. They're going to remain critical. LTE is, you know, making advancements. And today we want to demonstrate for you and let you hear from some, you know, real life users on how this is working in their jurisdictions. We're seeing that convergence of that happening. It doesn't always meet the operational needs, but there are occasions when it will do that. And so I will let the panelists introduce themselves. And then we're going to go through and let them speak to their jurisdiction and their agency and what they've been doing with LMR and LTE integration. So with that I'm going to let them go down the line and introduce themselves.  

Noah Jaehnert: Hey, good afternoon, I'm Noah Jaehnert. I am with the Vernon Township Fire Department just east of Indianapolis, Indiana. I spent about 15 years in IT and cybersecurity full time and was doing fire and EMS as a reserve or part time, while also maintaining that full-time career. And prior to my role there, I was the director of Emerging Technology for the State of Indiana's Integrated Public Safety Commission. And we'll touch on that agency and what it does here in a minute.  

William Chapman: Good afternoon, everybody. My name is William Chapman. I'm the statewide interoperability and watch center manager for the state of Oregon. Also ride backwards on a fire truck a couple of nights a week. Yeah. Happy to be here. Thanks.  

Jeremy Knoll: Good afternoon, Jeremy Knoll with the Arizona Department of Public Safety, telecommunications bureau manager for the radio system throughout the state, as well as the statewide interoperability coordinator.  

Jesse Cooper: And I want to thank these gentlemen for taking the time to share their experiences with us. Before my time with FirstNet, I worked with Phoenix PD for 29 years. Worked with these gentlemen and just really, they have a lot of experience and knowledge when it comes to how to properly utilize this technology. So with that, Noah.  

Noah Jaehnert: So like I said, we're going to touch base on kind of Indiana's adoption of land mobile radio to long term evolution, but to set the stage. What is Indiana's Integrated Public Safety Commission? What do we do and what was the impetus for kind of implementing LMR-LTE? So statewide land mobile radio system, 112,000 IDs on the system, 2,500 talk groups. That's a lot, right? Any of you in here dealt with, managed, worked on a system like that? Statewide systems are complex. Average weekly usage, about 2,300, 2,500 users.  

And one of the things we were looking to do is reduce cost, right? How do we, from an infrastructure perspective, not have to build another tower? Our former executive director was quoted as actually saying, you know, if I can avoid it, I'm going to avoid building another tower. I'm going to let the carriers do that for me. So, that's where we started to look at our different state, local, federal partners and see how could we work with them to identify specific use cases where the LTE function, integrated with our state radio system, could provide benefit.  

So what were those benefits? Agencies that we worked with saw reduced cost. I'm going to throw that asterisk at the bottom is really tiny. And I'm going to shout it from the rooftop. We, the Integrated Public Safety Commission, does not see LTE devices as a replacement for a device in the hands of a first responder that's walking into a burning building or potentially getting shot at.  

The mission-critical nature of the communication, I still want that P25 radio in their hands. It's getting better, and I really appreciate all the hard work that the FirstNet Authority, MCPTT, 3GPP and all those other acronyms are doing. It's still not there yet. So we were cautiously optimistic in seeing that certain roles that are non-frontline can leverage this technology, and we're working with agencies to adopt that.  

More covert. We saw quite a bit of law enforcement agencies looking into LMR to LTE, because I can pick up my cell phone and I can talk on the radio. I can put my AirPods in and I can be on the radio system. We can – this is a big one for us as the system managers – move communications off the state radio system. Everybody hates that busy bonk when they're grabbing this radio and pushing that button. How do we make the things that don't need to be on the radio system, how do we move those off? Created some LTE only talk groups. We also had some agencies that looked at it from a dead spot mitigation perspective. Indiana, everybody thinks of as cornfields. And you might be right. But we also have some hills and valleys and places that sometimes signal just from a P25 system doesn't propagate as well. So we had a couple agencies that looked at it. There is a police department in Indiana called the Santa Claus Indiana Police Department. They have the largest, fair park, I think, amusement park in the state called Holiday World. It's in a bowl. And so their officers would carry a P25 radio and carry a cell phone with LTE backup integrated with state radio system to maintain their communications.  

We can increase range. My radio or my cell phone here can talk back to Indiana. And I am, you know, way far away from there. So in March 2022 we had five agencies that had adopted this LMR to LTE in some way. And then just kind of scaled from there and saw quite a bit of increase in the 2023-to-2024 timeframe. I believe as of 2025, we're probably about 35, 36 agencies. But quite a neat, you know, growth and adoption of the technology in the state. A significant portion of our adoption was with law enforcement. So 19 of those 30 some-odd were law enforcement, seven were different state agencies, six were county, two were EMA.  

And then the last, fire departments were one and EMS agencies were one. This does not count anybody that was in a trial period. So we had a handful of agencies that were looking at this and going, we want to evaluate the technology, but we're not ready to make the leap yet. So, it's been an exciting journey, and I'm very glad to have played a small part in it, in seeing how this technology has been adopted at a statewide level and got a bunch of other lessons learned and some policies and practices and procedures that we put in place. Because one of the things we really tried to make sure we did is do this in a thoughtful manner that did not negatively impact our state radio system, the P25 system. I'm going to turn it over to Jeremy.  

Jeremy Knoll: All right, let's talk about Arizona. Well, just very high level from Arizona's point of view. At the Department of Public Safety. I fall under that, which is like your highway patrol, your criminal investigations statewide. But we also take care of a bunch of other state agencies. We have federal agencies. We have local and county that utilize our system, and we are in the process of building out a P25 statewide system currently.  

So we're getting rid of our 1970s technology finally. But with that, obviously there's a huge expense in building that system out. And to Noah's point, where can we alter that and look at different things? One thing about the state of Arizona is the topography is crazy. All I thought of when I moved to Arizona was Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. That's what I pictured. And boy, am I wrong. It's extremely diverse. So think of elevations. We go literally from 70ft above sea level to over 12,000ft throughout the state. So when it comes to radio coverage and even LTE coverage. Wow. Very big challenge.  

So, obviously with that, we know that our land mobile radio isn't going to cover everywhere. Our LTE isn't going to cover everywhere. And we have the different variations. So augmenting our radio coverage is obviously the name of the game. I can't build towers everywhere. It's too expensive. And if LTE has already done it, why not? Right.  

So we've used the high power units in areas where I can get a little extra boost and get that coverage in some areas that I need, or even just the throughput increase. I may have coverage, but that throughput may be really poor. Using that HPUE device has actually made a really big difference in pumping that that data quickly, much more quickly, and bigger obviously. So that was a big one for us. I have to give props to the FirstNet Authority and driving the cell booster pros. That's been a huge gain for us as well. The GO RED devices. And then soon I look forward to all the carriers are adopting satellite. So, because there's areas that none of us are going to build in and we still need those coverage areas. And unfortunately, a lot of those areas are places that we have very bad accidents and very, you know, big things that happen. So looking forward to some of that. So we have the APX NEXT that you're using that has the built-in LTE. We happen to use FirstNet for that. But then we also have the cell carriers or, I'm sorry, a cellular router but in our cars. And so we use the Wi-Fi on that to connect into our radios, both the mobile and the portable, if need be. And again, I can have multiple carriers in that. And again, major game changer for us because now we're getting to some of these areas where I don't have the coverage and now they do.  

I'm getting lots of pats on the back and some hugs. I mean, literally like, these guys are like, I cannot believe all these years I've never had coverage in these areas, and now I do. Really, truly an amazing feat. And it's exciting to see where we're going to go from there.  

Talk groups, obviously cross patching some of those LMR to LTE talk groups for that seamless operation. You know, being able to have some of your command staff that would have a push to talk app that can talk on the LMR system when they're not in the area. I had a gentleman that happened to be on vacation and can't let go. And so he was in Hawaii on the beach and listening to a major event that was going on in his district. And got involved and he thought that was the coolest thing ever, right? Not that I'm saying that's the right thing to do, but it's pretty cool. We've got to that point where we have that technology. On the flip side, I always had a problem with my governor's security. They travel everywhere, and they think that that frequency that they have, that channel on their radio works everywhere. Obviously they're causing some issues and not legal when they're doing that. Well, now when they have that radio with the LTE in it, they're on their same channel. They're everywhere they go and it works phenomenally. And they're able to talk back to home base back in Phoenix. So just a total game changer for them, major breakthrough.  

And then Noah touched on it. Our non-uniformed personnel and being able to utilize the mission critical push to talk or whatever the vendor may be, right, in those covert situations is huge. I don't feel like we're there yet. Completely. I think there's room to grow in that area, but it is a game changer for those folks to be able to still communicate well, in an incognito way. Right. And then again, lastly, that reduction in the expense for building those LMR sites. I mean, I usually just joke it's about a million bucks a pop. Sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less, but a million bucks a pop for an LMR site out there. That adds up really quick. And building a new state system, yeah, it's extremely expensive. So big, big things for us. And, you know, I encourage you guys to, again, look at all these different options for yourselves. And with that, William.  

William Chapman: So before I launch into my slides, I wanted to just touch on a couple of things. Who here has been to Oregon? There's always like way less hands. So I was born and raised in Arizona, moved to Oregon about six years ago to take the job. And I also had some preconceived notions about Oregon, you know, pine trees and ocean, which is kind of why we moved there. But there's actually a lot of parts that look like Arizona. And we have sea level all the way up to 12,000ft, Mount Hood and very rural areas. And so I also had a notion that, you know, mission critical push to talk really wasn't a first responder tool yet. Right? Augmentation. And then I went out into some of the rural areas, like Harney County, which is 10,000 plus square miles, and less than 7,000 people. More cows per capita than people.  

And the officers there, the three sheriff's deputies that are that are on for this 10,000mi² would respond to a domestic disturbance and get on the radio and say, dispatch, if you don't hear from me in two hours. Send the cavalry. And then I thought, well, you know what? Maybe if I put an LTE device in their hand, that is a heck of a lot better than not having anything else. So maybe LTE device is ready for certain first responders, right?  

And so what we've been doing in Oregon over the last two years really is trying to figure out use cases where we can get the technology into first responders hands so they can use it and test it and feel it out. Right. I don't know that we are there are any agencies that are relying on it solely yet today. But again, we're trying to put it into their hands so they can get a feel for it, and then use it to augment systems, just like my colleagues up here have shared.  

So what I'll do is I'll share a couple of events and use cases where we've seen it work really well. I want to call out Jeff Perkins on my team in the back of the room there. He's our public safety communications specialist. And for the last two years on our team, and years before in his previous role, he supported one of Oregon's largest special events called the Portland Rose Festival. Founded in 1907, there is probably hundreds of thousands over the two weeks. Multiple parades over multiple days. Fleet week. There's a huge carnival, concerts, dragon boat races. Really a major special event that's really put on by the city in partnership with the organization. Kind of unique that the organization itself doesn't pay for city services. There's a historical agreement that goes back basically to 1907 that relies on a handshake that the city will support it for essentially no cost. That means everything that goes into this, this event from a public safety perspective, is pretty much pro-bono, which drives down their ability to support it from a public safety perspective and really has to make them look at how much a solution like communications is going to cost when they want to do something new.  

So a couple of years ago, Jeff was asked to look at how they could support communications amongst public safety. The Rose Fest itself, their staff and Portland's – it's called the NET team. But think of it like their CERT team, CERT they use for a different for their SWAT team, but they don't want to call them CERT. So it's their NET team. They had an incident two years ago where a gentleman ran some barricades and tried to run into the crowd, and they really decided that they wanted to have the ability for these folks to be able to talk to each other in a controlled manner. And so Jeff has been really instrumental in working with the Rose Fest itself, and their radio system manager there. They rent essentially a DMR system for the event, the local public safety P25 trunk system, their radio system manager and FirstNet to deploy a solution that would work for everybody and bridge those dissimilar talk paths into a single talk path. And you can see kind of on the diagram here, and what I like to point out on this slide, it's really about the human being able to communicate amongst all of those people. The technology is there. We can do this stuff today, but it's really about the person involved and how we change the culture to embrace these new technologies.  

So just some more about the event itself, but Starlight parade, Junior Rose Fest parade, Grand Floral parade, really continuous monitoring. This year – so in 2024, huge success. We went back, we got requested to extend state to support – deploy Jeff out to Portland again. Jeff's done a great job about getting the right people in the room and educating them. And the system is deployed again. It's in operation right now. And it's doing what it should do, but it's that culture change, right? It's, everybody's heard the saying, 100 years of tradition, unimpeded by progress. So that's really one of the challenges that we have with mission critical push to talk is education and letting people experience those tools in their hands. Which is why one of the things that we've also worked really hard to do is develop a state cache program. So we've taken these devices and as we've been able to acquire them, we've put them into caches and we have them available for special event support. We also have them available for disaster response support.  

The problem that we run into is funding. So we can't give them out for free, or we end up deploying them to agencies that need them, but they end up having to sort of pay for the use of them when they're out. So we've been trying to figure out how to address that, but it is one downside of them, but it does allow us to deploy them in response to incidents when maybe we have some FirstNet users on scene and we have a COLT out there, we can augment that incidents communications unit leader and their teams so that they can have that interoperable system. So they have mission critical push to talk on them. There's some internet devices there, a couple of cradle points that can augment that signal as well, iPhones that have push to talk on them. So but again, it gets the device into the responders’ hands and they can see, oh, this really does work. We deployed these for the World Games, World Athletic Championships, which is an Olympic qualifying event down in Eugene. We deployed them for a couple of county fairs where they don't have a trunk system down there. That's the best communications they've ever had in support of that local county fair, though.  

The other thing that we have is our Department of Human Services bought ten CRDs. They are primarily for sheltering missions. We know that at some point there's going to be a 9.0 earthquake on the West Coast that's going to do a lot of damage. It'll be the worst disaster that the United States has ever faced. It's coming probably within the next hundred years. Hopefully it's not tomorrow but could be. Could be today. But when we know that when this happens, a lot of the state will be islanded. Right. So there's 800 and something bridges in Oregon, if you didn't know that, most of which will fail in this earthquake. It's going to take a long time to get to those folks. But by deploying these assets and pre-staging them, we'll at least be able to communicate in some small way with certain locations. So that was the concept behind this program. The other thing that I just wanted to share that we're really trying to do is look at anybody that offers mission critical push to talk and meets that standard. And so, how we support any carrier in the state that is willing to come to the table and work with us.  

FirstNet has been great. They've come, we've adopted a standard naming convention, and we share those with any public safety agency that wants them. 16 interoperable talk groups, and we will be connecting those at the state level to other carriers’ mission critical push to talk. So that way, if you've got a calling channel in your LTE device that is Oregon Call 50, it is Oregon Call 50 across any carrier. So we're laying that groundwork right now, buying that infrastructure and working with all three carriers to do that. So that's all I've got. Thanks.  

Noah Jaehnert: On that note, on the carrier-agnostic aspect, that's one of the things that Indiana did. When we first went down the path of land mobile radio to long term evolution integration, the first thing that was one of the requirements is it has to be agnostic, because you're going to have areas within the state that “insert carrier here” is going to be great, and “insert other carrier here” is not. So we ended up with Motorola's Critical Connect gateway that allowed us to bridge both LTE to LTE devices, LTE to the land mobile radio system through our actual radio core, and it also addressed an issue that we had, which was a policy – we did not want to allow radio over IP devices on our network or state radio network. That policy has since changed with some new and emerging technology, but that gateway was essential in us trying to be able to ensure that we were agnostic as to whichever carrier. And so, you as a fire department, a police department, a state agency, whichever vendor you have selected, you could bring that to us and we could integrate. As of when I left the state, we had Verizon, FirstNet, AT&T commercial. And then we were working with T-Mobile to get their push to talk offering on board as well. So, very fortunate to have that. That was a significant investment that the state made.  

 The other benefit outside of the LMR to LTE integration is that it allowed us, at the state level, to patch any talk group to any talk group on the state system. So, and then you could bridge that to LTE. So a lot of benefit there. We also maintain a cache of LTE specific devices. I had to chuckle because our friends at CISA just posted pictures from the Indianapolis 500 on their Facebook page. And if you look at the back of the phone that is being held, our bright yellow sticker with the Integrated Public Safety Commission is on there. That's one of our cache devices that was deployed in support of the largest single day sporting event in the United States. So very neat to see that our devices made it out there for that and those devices, you know, we were trying to figure out what made the most sense from a cost perspective. We had not historically charged any agency that wanted to use those. They just had to have a true public safety need to be able to request those. Then that gets processed by our ESF #2 desk and then deployed as needed. So neat to see that the caches of equipment are becoming more standard and more common, and including things more than just the standard P25 radio. So thank you for sharing that.  

Jesse Cooper: Jeremy, I know DPS has been involved in some of the early efforts, essentially AWS is going to let us take anything IP related and connect it and put it together. How important is that going to be for Arizona? Where do you see that fitting in with your agency as one of the first to adopt it?  

Jeremy Knoll: It's going to be big to be able to have all the different agencies, all the different types of equipment have an easy way to bridge that gap and have that interoperability across the board. It needs to be simple, it needs to be quick, and it needs to be standard so that it can actually happen.  

Noah Jaehnert: Let me jump in there too. One of the biggest barriers to adoption that we had was fear of the unknown. And on top of that was the inability for us to pull any good data or analytics out of some of these platforms, these newer technologies. If I cannot pull information out of a system to make decisions at the administrative level and go back to my administration, our legislative partners, to say, hey, here's the adoption rate, or, hey, here's how that that investment you made years ago is paying off, and here's the number of people using it, I can't tell you the ROI of that solution. Worse, I can't open the floodgates to allow new users to adopt it. So my push there is any solution that we develop has to be able to have the data and the information pulled out of it as to how it's being used, who's using it. And in my case, I needed to be able to know how many talk paths are we using? I can do that on the P25 system, but I couldn't do it in a world with the gateway.  

Jesse Cooper: So time's up for today. I just want to thank the panelists for sharing your experiences. I want to thank you. There are public safety stakeholders. Part of my job is innovation and investment with the authority. Um, so as we get those reinvestment dollars to put back into the network and put back into the operation, it's critical to hear from you. So as you heard this morning, your feedback, what you can share with us is critically important. We're going to be making decisions, moving this forward in the future. And we do want to meet the needs of public safety. So I just want to thank everybody. I appreciate your time.  

Narrator: Thanks for listening today. We're excited to have you join our podcast community. Make sure to subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, and YouTube. You can learn more about the First Responder Network Authority at FirstNet.gov and learn about FirstNet products and services at FirstNet.com.