 From the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering AT&T Spark. Now, here's Jeff Frick. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at San Francisco at the historic Palace of Fine Arts. It's a beautiful spot, it's redone, they moved the exploratory amount a couple years ago. So now it's in a really nice event space and we're here for the AT&T Spark event and the conversation's all around 5G. But we're excited to have our first guest and he's working on something that's a little bit tangential to 5G related but not absolutely connected, but really important work. It's Chris Sambar, he is the SVP of FirstNet at AT&T. Chris, well, great to see you. Thanks, Jeff, great to be here, I appreciate it. Yeah, so you had a nice keynote presentation talking about FirstNet. So for people that are familiar, what is AT&T FirstNet? Sure, I'll give a quick background. As I was mentioning up there, tomorrow is the 17 year anniversary of 9-11. So 17 years ago, tomorrow, a big problem in New York City, lots of first responders descended on the area, all of them were trying to communicate with each other. They were trying to use their radios, which they're typically what you see a first responder using the wireless networks in the area. Unfortunately, challenges, it wasn't working. They were having trouble communicating with each other, their existing wireless networks were getting congested. And so the 9-11 commission came out with a report years later and they said, we need a dedicated communications network just for first responders. And so they spun on this up and they said, we're gonna dedicate some spectrum, 20 megahertz of D-class spectrum, which is really prime spectrum, $7 billion. And we're gonna set up this federal entity called the FirstNet Authority and they're gonna create a public safety network across America. So FirstNet Authority spent a few years figuring out how to do it and they landed on what we have today, which was a public-private partnership between AT&T and public safety throughout America. And we're building on a terrific network across the country. It is literally a separate network. So when I think of wireless in America, I think of four main commercial carriers, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, this is the fifth carrier. This is public safety's wireless network, just for them. So when you say an extra network, so it's a completely separate, obviously you're leveraging infrastructure like towers and power and those types of things, but it's a completely separate network than the existing four that you mentioned. Yeah, so if you walk into our data centers throughout the country, you're gonna see separate hardware, physical infrastructure that is just for FirstNet. That's the core network, just for this network. On the radio access network, we've got antennas that have band 14 on, that's public safety's band, dedicated just for them when they need it. So yeah, it's literally a physically separate network. The SIM card that goes into a FirstNet device is a different SIM card than our commercial users would use as it's separate. So one of the really interesting things about 5G and kind of the evolution of wireless is taking some of the load that has been taken by Wi-Fi and other options for fast always on connectivity. I would assume radio, and I don't know that much about radio frequencies that have been around forever with communications in first responders, is the vision that the 5G will eventually take over that type of communication as well? Yeah, absolutely. So if you look at the evolution of first responder and public safety communications, for many years now they've used radios, relatively small narrow spectrum bands for narrow band voice, just voice communications. Really doesn't do data, maybe a little bit, but really not much. Now they're gonna expand to this spectrum, the D block spectrum, excuse me, which is 700 megahertz low band spectrum. That'll provide them with dedicated spectrum. And then the next step, as you say, is 5G. So take the load off as public safety kind of comes into the new public safety communication space that they've really been wanting for years and years. They'll start to utilize 5G as well on the network. So where are you on kind of the development of first net? Where are you in kind of the rollout? What's kind of the sequence of events? So the first thing we did, the award was last year in March, 2017. The first thing we did was we built out the core network. Only when I talked about all that physical infrastructure that basically took a year to build out. It was pretty extensive in about a half a billion dollars. So that was the first thing we did that completed earlier this year. Was that nationwide or major Metro cities? Nationwide, okay. And so now what we're doing is we are putting the spectrum that we were given, or I should say, we released for 25 years. We're putting that spectrum up across our towers all over the country. So that will take five years. It's a five year build out. Tens of thousands of towers across America. We'll get this public safety spectrum for public safety and for their use. Right. And we target by geo, by metro area. I mean, how's it gonna actually happen? That's a huge global rollout. Five years is a long time. How do you kind of prioritize? How are you kind of really going to market with this? So the band 14 spectrum is being rolled out in the major dense areas across the country. I will tell you that by the end of the rollout, five years from now, 99% of the population of America will have band 14 spectrum. So the vast majority of the population. Other areas where we don't roll it out, rural areas, for example, all of the features that public safety wants, we call them preemption and priority, which is the features that allow them to always have access to the network whenever they need it. Those features will be on our regular commercial spectrum. So if band 14 isn't there, the network will function exactly as if it were there for them. Right. And then how do you roll it out to the agencies? You know, all the first responders, the fire, the police, the EMTs, et cetera, how do they start to take advantage of this opportunity? Sure, so we started that earlier this year. We really started in the March, April timeframe in earnest, signing up agencies. And the uptake's been phenomenal. It's over 2,500 public safety agencies across America, over 150,000. And that number grows by thousands every week. You know, that's actually a pretty old number, but they are signing up in droves. In fact, one of the problems we were having initially is handling the volume of first responders that wanted to sign up. And the reason is they're seeing that whether it's a fire out in Oregon, and they need connectivity in the middle of nowhere in a forest where there's no wireless connectivity at all, we'll bring a vehicle out there, put up an antenna and provide them connectivity. Whether it's a Fourth of July show, or a parade, or an active shooter, wherever large groups of people combine together and the network gets congested, they're seeing that, wow, my device works no matter what. I can always send a text message. I can send a video. It just works, but it didn't work before. So they love it. And they're really signing up in droves. It's really interesting, because it's interesting that this was triggered as part of the post-911 activity to make things better and make things safer. But there was a lot of buzz, especially out here in the West, with first responders in the news for running out of bandwidth. As you said, the firefighters, the fire's been burning out here, it seems like forever. And really nobody thinking about it. Those are, obviously, they're probably roaming on their traditional data plan. And they're probably out there for weeks and weeks at a time that wasn't part of their allocation when they figured out what plan they should be. So the timing is pretty significant. And there's clearly a big demand for this. Absolutely, so that example that you cite is a really good one. So two weeks ago, there was a lot in the news about a fire agency in the West that said they were throttled by their carrier. It was a commercial carrier. And commercial carriers have terms and conditions that sometimes they need to throttle usage if you get to a certain level. That's how commercial networks work. Right, right. FirstNet was built with not only different technology, hardware, software, but with different terms and conditions, because we understand that when a first responder responds to your house, we don't want that to be the minute in time when their plan got maxed out and now they're getting throttled. So we don't have any throttling on the firstNet network. So it's not only the hardware, software, technical aspects of the network, but the terms and conditions are different. It's what you would expect that a first responder would have and want on their device. And that's what we're providing for them. Right, and the other cool thing that you mentioned is we see it all the time. We go to a lot of conferences. A lot of people probably experience it at big events. Still today, Wi-Fi and traditional LTE has hard times in super dense environments where there's just tons and tons and tons of bodies, I imagine absorbing all that signal as much as anything else. So to have a separate spectrum in those type of environments which are usually chaotic when you've got first responders or some of these mass events that you outlined is a pretty important feature to not get just completely wiped out by everybody else happening to be there at the same time. Exactly. I'll give you two quick examples that illustrate what you just said. The first one is on the 4th of July in downtown Washington, D.C. You can imagine that show, it's an awesome show, but there are hundreds of thousands of people that gather around that, the Washington Monument to watch the show. And the expectation is at the peak of the show, when all those people are there, you're not really gonna be sending text messages or calling people. The network's probably just not gonna work for it. Well, that's, we've all gotten used to that. Right, right. This year, I had first responders who were there during the event, sending me videos of the fireworks going off, something that never would have been possible before. And them saying, oh my gosh, this actually works the way it's supposed to work. We can use our phones. And then the second example, which is a really sad example, there was a recent school shooting down in Florida. You had sheriffs, local police, ambulances. You even had some federal authorities that showed up. They couldn't communicate with each other because they were on different radio networks. And imagine if they had that capability of FirstNet, where they could communicate with each other and the network worked, even though there were thousands of people that were gathering around that scene to see what was going on. So that's the capability we're bringing to public safety. And it's really good for all of us. And do you see that this is kind of the aggregator of the multi-disput systems that exist now, as you mentioned in your keynote. And again, there's different agencies. They've got different frequencies. They've got police, fire, ambulance, and federal agencies that now potentially this as just kind of a unified first responder network becomes the de facto way that I can get in touch with. Anyone regardless of where they come from or who they're associated with. That is exactly the vision of FirstNet. You know, in major cities across America, police, fire, emergency medical, typically are on three different radio networks. And it's very difficult for them to communicate with each other. They may have a shared frequency or two between them, but it's very challenging for them. Our goal is to sign all of them up, put them on one LTE network. The FirstNet network customized for them so they can all communicate with each other, regardless of how much congestion is on the network. So that's the vision of FirstNet. And then that's even before you get into the 5G impacts, which will be the data impacts, whereas I think, again, you showed in some of your examples, the enhanced amount of data that they can bring to bear on solving a problem, whether it's a layout of a building for the fire department or drone footage from up above. We talked to Menlo Park Fire. They're using drones more and more to give eyes over the fire to the guys down on the ground. So there's a lot of really interesting applications that you can get more better data to drive, more better applications through that network. Help these guys do the job. Yeah, you've got smart city's cameras. Don't you want that to be able to stream over the network and give it to first responders so they know what they're going to encounter when they show up to the scene of whatever issues going on in the city? Of course you do. And you need a really reliable, stable network to provide that on. Well, Chris is not only an interesting work, but very noble and important work. So I appreciate all the efforts that you're putting in and thanks for stopping by. I appreciate it, Jeff. It's been great talking with you. All right, he's Chris. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts at AT&T Spark. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.