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FCC Wants Nationwide Wireless Public Safety Network

A nationwide wireless public safety network is part of the FCC's National Broadband Plan. the plan will ask Congress to set aside $16-$18 billion over a 10-year period to help build and operate the nationwide public safety network.

"The private sector simply is not going to build a nationwide, state-of-the-art, interoperable broadband network for public safety on its own dime," Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communication Commission said.

While recommending that the nationwide public safety network access the entire 700-MHz band, Genachowski said as much as 80 megahertz should be set aside for public safety use. But even that's not enough spectrum, he indicated, adding that the plan will propose "a medium and long-term strategy to obtain additional spectrum resources for broadband use," he said. "I am committed to identifying additional spectrum resources for public safety broadband as the need for broadband grows over time."


(Indiana Data and Communications System, an in-car computer network)

The FCC should take a look at how this idea is used in Charles Stross' 2007 novel Halting State; Stross uses the phrase copspace to denote a network set aside for use by police officers that is accessed wirelessly via overlay specs:

CopSpace sheds some light on matters, of course. Blink and it descends in its full glory. Here's the spiralling red diamond of a couple of ASBO cases on the footpath (orange jackets, blue probation service tags saying they're collecting litter.) There's the green tree of signs sprouting over the doorway of number thirty-nine, each tag naming the legal tenants of a different flat. Get your dispatcher to drop you a ticket, and the signs open up to give you their full police and social service case files, where applicable... This is the twenty-first century, and all the terabytes of CopSpace have exploded out of the dusty manila files and into the real world...
(Read more about copspace)

From Information Week.

Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 3/16/2010)

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