Emergency responders cross county lines every day in the greater Washington region, and their radios go along, too. But some emergency communications officials fear that a reshuffling of the radio spectrum will threaten their ability to communicate across borders.
In the late 1990s, police and fire agencies started to notice interference on their radio channels from such commercial users as Nextel. In response, the Federal Communications Commission decided last year to authorize a nationwide swap in which public safety frequencies would move to the lower end of the 800-megahertz band and commercial users would move to the higher end. This three-year, $4.9 billion project began June 27 and will be paid for by Nextel.
The project involves moving thousands of police and fire radio systems to new frequencies, and Tony Rose, Charles County's emergency communication chief, worries that in the short term it will cripple the ability of emergency responders to talk across borders.
"When this is all said and done, rebanding will be one of the best things done for public safety in a long time," Rose said. "But it's getting there that's the problem."
For example, Fairfax County is slated to change its system months before many neighboring counties. "There are 15 jurisdictions and 40,000 radios," he said. "Do these 40,000 radios not talk to Fairfax [when it changes over], or do we [reprogram] them once so they can talk to Fairfax and then once again to talk to Prince William?"
Grossly simplified, the problem can be somewhat equated to one friend changing his cell phone number and another reprogramming his new number in her own phone. It's as if 15 friends change their numbers, and each person has thousands of phones to reprogram. Having a technician reprogram each radio to recognize a new frequency each time a neighboring county switches could be expensive; not changing them could cost lives if a firefighter responding to a blaze in a neighboring county could not use his radio.
"The question is how many first responders are placed at risk because interoperability is down?" Rose asked.
Officials at Nextel and the Transition Administrator, the independent entity created by the FCC to oversee the rebanding, said there will be no lapse in service.
"We don't anticipate that there should be any situation when mutual aid is off the air," said Joe Boyer, a member of the Transition Administrator team. He said new technology coming from Nextel would make it easier to switch the channels on the region's tens of thousands of radios. Anne Arundel County and Alexandria police say they already have plans to use a technology that can connect seemingly incompatible radio systems.
Boyer said the specific logistics of the switch cannot be worked out until each county starts negotiating with Nextel in the coming months. "The reason we can't say, 'This is how you have to do it,' is because every area of the country is different," Boyer said.
Tim O'Regan, a spokesman for Nextel, said early planning and cross-county coordination would be critical in preserving the ties. "When we get around to negotiating with public safety, part of our discussions with them will be to raise this matter. Do you have mutual aid channels? What are those? Have you talked to those people about the fact that you're about to be reconfigured?"
Supporters and critics agree that what makes the transition so difficult is the same thing that makes the plans for it difficult to judge: Nothing this big has been carried out before.
