First Responder Paging Over Public Television

Legacy first responder dispatch paging systems can suffer from slow response, limited area signal coverage, conflicting assignments in an individual's pages, and low disaster resilience. This proposal focuses on the feasibility review, design and development planning for an inNvative nationwide first responder paging capability. This capability would employ the U.S. Public television network and the deployting Next Generation (NextGen) television standard to significantly improve upon legacy paging-system performance. NextGen TV datacasting, broadcasting broadband data from a digital television transmitter, will increase paging rates up to a thousand times, provide over 95 percent coverage of the U.S. population, and greatly increase paging resilience to disaster using our nation's public television infrastructure.This Phase I project, called "First Responder Paging Over Public Television," will (1) Collect and vet first responder paging requirements for Computer Aided Dispatch Systems; (2) Select a suitable data-exchange standard between Public Safey Answering Points (PSAPs) and public television stations; (3) Develop 30% and (4) 60% paging-server design specifications; and (5) Deliver a Desgin-Development plan. The Plan will be used in Phase II to build, test and demonstrate an on-air first responder paging-server system linking a CAD system to one or more TV stations. This solution, with first responder paging as a priority, can expand its applications to provide high-reliability commercial paging as well as in-motion voice, data, imagery and video messaging throughout the U.S. The NextGen TV datacasting system will provide rapid, tailored, individually targetable, and encrypted content to Federal, state and local public saftey and service personnel.