Advanced Phenomenal Co-piloting Of emergency response: With this new definition of APCO, Tracey Hillburn of Bossier Parish (La.) Communications secured her place as the winner of the Public Safety Communications Space-Age Communications Competition.

In the July issue, we asked our readers to tell us what they thought public safety communications would be like in 2030. Entries were submitted via e-mail and on site in Houston at the 76th Annual APCO Conference & Exposition. The judges pored over the entries, appreciative of the vision of APCO’s members. At noon on Aug. 3, the winner was announced and presented with the prize, a $150 American Express Gift Card. Below, the creative results.

Advanced Phenomenal Co-Piloting Of Emergency Response
By Tracey Hillburn, Bossier Parish (La.) Communications
The year 2030 will have emergency communications operations so advanced that communications officers will be co-piloting emergency vehicles for response. Dispatch will activate alarms to notify field personnel to man the vehicles, at which time the dispatchers will have pre-programmed the vehicles’ quickest response path to the location of the emergency through the GIS settings.

Advanced Technology
By Rachel Nuckols, Kanawha County (W.Va.) Emergency Ambulance Authority
Great advancements in the technology available to dispatchers will occur up to the year 2030. With advancements in computer technology increasing every day, computer-aided dispatching (CAD) software will become more operator friendly and allow more agencies to interact with one system, including agencies many miles away. Dispatchers scan the scene for a panoramic view. This will help determine what units are needed and who specifically to send to the scene.

Because this will now be court admissible, you will be required to take the new APCO class, “Court Jargon: Leading the Witness.” You will also be required to sit in on three court cases in which a video instant recorder was used to see how the court system handles these new cases. I know some of you are reluctant to try anything new, but this will be a wonderful tool and will save many lives to come.

One small step for mankind, one big step for saving lives.

700 MHz Rebanding
By Arthur S. Katz, Katz Law Office PC, New York
In 2030, the public safety communications environment will have been transformed by technological, political and economic forces.

A critical event in 2024 is the election of Republican President Chelsea Clinton. She runs on a platform of national security in response to two phenomena: accelerating climactic change that has increased natural disasters around the world and decimated agriculture in the U.S., prompting massive illegal immigration from Mexico (and Australia) and through the U.S. into Canada. The resulting border security problem, which Clinton plans to address with massive wireless monitoring systems and automatic drone interceptors, has been aggravated by the increasing technological sophistication of Al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda has equipped terrorists traveling from the continuing wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kazakhstan with devices that can disrupt wireless commercial and public safety communications.

Over the previous 30 years, public safety communications infrastructure has become more cost-effective, largely due to advances in software and microchip technology and the globalization of design and manufacturing. Those factors have resulted in a modularization of virtually all software and equipment that permits easy programming and physical integration of hardened and mission-critical features as an overlay on commercial products. The leader in that effort in the U.S. and around the world is “No-Mo,” the nickname for Nokia-Motorola-Harris, the result of a three-way merger in 2015 driven by a lack of adequate funding for public safety networks that reduced commercial activity and forced industry consolidation.

In contrast, the need for additional spectrum has grown and become critical. While technology has generated unanticipated gains in the efficiency of spectrum use, the quantity of data being transmitted by public and private users has skyrocketed. As a result, in 2026, the FCC ordered a rebanding of 700 MHz spectrum so that public safety could acquire the 10 MHz of D Block bandwidth that had been auctioned to Sprint Nextel in 2014. A new 700 MHz rebanding program is being paid for by “Mextel,” the company resulting from the acquisition of Sprint Nextel by what had been known as Telmex, the largest Mexican commercial carrier. Mextel was authorized to be created as part of the same treaty in 2016 that finally settled the 800 MHz rebanding issues in the U.S. Mexico border region.

Only with the resulting 10 MHz of contiguous spectrum is public safety expected to be able to use the technologies being developed to eliminate the terrorists’ wireless interference devices. As part of the same law that enabled the FCC 700 MHz rebanding order, until the public safety spectrum crisis is mitigated, all Americans will, in addition to receiving a Form W-2 reporting their annual salaries, also receive an annual From B-2 from the FCC reporting household bandwidth use. That use will be subject to tax paid by income taxes, with the money earmarked for payment of the public safety national security networks. As an interim measure, all wireless carriers have been ordered to price their commercial wireless service offering to allow consumers to choose between three levels of preemptiblity. Consumers will pay significantly more for service not subject to ruthless or secondary priority preemption by public safety.

The private sector expresses serious concerns at how commercial activity may be affected. President Clinton in response says that she is optimistic that with the cooperation and inter­national management talent of Mextel and NoMo, the 700 MHz rebanding will be completed ahead of its three-year schedule, which she regrets will, nevertheless, be a year after the end of her current second term in office.

Working Seamlessly
By Carol W. Adams, RPL, Stafford County (Va.) Sheriff’s Office Emergency Communications
If you had asked me 30-plus years ago, I could never have imagined the changes we live with—the capabilities that we have today. Having been in the public safety communications field for 30-plus years, I’m hopeful that through technology and opportunity the industry will look like partners working seamlessly together to provide for the needs of the public’s safety. This effort would include local agencies working seamlessly through voice, data and other solutions. More importantly, I see the professional recognition as a critical part of public safety system through training, benefits and recognition of effort for the unique and important job done every day.

Worldwide Data
By Richard Rybicki, Michigan Public Safety Communications, APCO Historical Committee Chair
Yes, there will be a radio carried by the patrol officer. But it will not be your grandfather’s PREP [personal radio equipped police—a term coined in Detroit for portable radios]! The communications device will be a portable database and video communicator. IT will be able to instantly communicate with a control officer (telecommunicator) via voice and a worldwide database covering records and procedures to maintain the officer’s presence and knowledge of any civil situation. Voice will remain one of the key communications interactions.

Satellites for the Mission
By Joe Geleta, N.J. Emergency Management
It’s quite evident that by the year 2030 the state of public safety communications will be remarkably different. Although it will be different, the core and the foundation upon which we all exist will remain solid. We will focus our various missions on the words of interoperability, redundancy, partnerships and service. By 2030, public safety communications will be centered on voice-activated technology that utilizes satellites to facilitate communications. No longer will users be limited to the extent that they can communicate across vast distances and geographic challenges. At no time will users experience a shutdown due to some type of event or disaster. The future holds great things for public safety communications. The future holds a seamless transition for our goal of adhering to our mission of service, interoperability, redundancy and partnerships.

APCO 2K
By Barry T. Furey, Raleigh-Wake (N.C.) 9-1-1 Center
As we look forward 20 years into our future and wonder how far we will travel, it’s fitting that we look 20 years backward prior to starting this journey. Come back with me to 1990, when most of us used paper maps, the FCC had not yet addressed wireless location, APCO Project 25 was still learning to crawl and VoIP was an unheard of term.

With the fantastic growth in the personal communications and social networking areas that our world is undergoing, do we think that the changes between now and that seemingly far away year of 2030 will be any less magical? Envision a land where every piece of critical information is immediately available to first responders in an emergency. Where medical records are delivered to paramedics before they touch a patient, and where firefighters receive not only floor plans of burning buildings, but also real-time videos from the fire floor itself, including the pinpoint location of victims. Imagine call information being shared with officers who are en route even prior to dispatch, where mug shots and criminal records are a touch away—or perhaps just a word away because all mobile units respond to voice commands to provide lifesaving information in a hands-free environment.

In 2030, consider a land where the 9-1-1 center itself is part of a new virtual reality in which off-duty telecommunicators can report to work simply by logging onto their home PC and start fielding calls in their pajamas. Think of a future where 1-1-2, 9-1-1 and any recognized emergency number will work in every part of the world so that travelers can access immediate help and think of their calls not so much as calls but as multimedia events. Picture if you will the incredible technology required to fulfill this dream, but also pause to remember the incredible people that it will take to invent, maintain and operate these miracles of science, because in 2030—as in 2010—it is the people of APCO and of public safety communications who will always be the critical link between life and death.

Artificial Intelligence
By Harrison Atkins, PSSA, City of Cedar Park, Texas
Communications in the year 2030 will achieve a flow of “traffic” that greatly differs from the past (aka 2010). Communications of the past were dependent on push mentality—as in it required human intervention to establish transmissions between a sender and a receiver. Communications of 2030 will be so intelligent that systems will listen, learn and automatically understand (know) who, where and why senders will need to speak with receivers and automatically know which directions to establish and what messages to send—rather than needing human actions to initiate and establish the “correct” senders and receivers—and the correct, efficient and appropriate messages to convey.

Communications Goes Star Trek
By Christopher Springer, Booz Allen Hamilton, McLean, Va.
Public safety communications in 2030 will take advantage of emerging artificial intelligence. By 2030, voice, video and data will have merged. Real-time streaming video, video conferencing and distributed sensor systems will be common. By 2030 computing devices will have achieved human-level intelligence, and so will our communications systems and devices.

Cognitive radios will autonomously select frequencies, modulation and coding to meet the anticipated needs of the public safety communications agent. Cognitive radios will autonomously share spectrum resources with public and private spectrum consumers. Communications equipment will be software-defined and easily upgradable in software. Devices will incorporate speech recognition, text-to-speech natural language processing and natural gesture interfaces, allowing the agent to converse naturally with the device and eliminating buttons and complex user interfaces.

Devices will hold over a “petabyte” of storage and will approach the size and form factor of the second-generation Star Trek communicator badge worn on the agent’s chest. Visual interfaces will be performed via retinal projectors, which draw an image in the agent’s eye with the use of lasers, allowing real-time augmented reality for the agent during the course of their mission.

Public safety vehicles will drive autonomously, freeing agents to concentrate on their mission. In 2030, public safety communications officials will leverage information superiority to enhance agent effectiveness.

Originally published in Public Safety Communications, Vol. 76(10):28-31, October 2010.