The Business Case of a Nationwide Wireless Network that Serves both Public Safety and Commercial Subscribers

Deploying a single nationwide broadband wireless network to serve all public safety users would have great advantages over the existing fragmented public safety systems. A nationwide system could be created to serve both public safety and commercial subscribers, which would allow a provider to exploit important economies of scope but force it to meet the more costly requirements of public safety. In 2007, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission tried to establish a public-private partnership whereby a commercial partner would commit to serving public safety agencies in return for access to valuable spectrum in which it could serve paying customers. No commercial partner emerged from the initial auction, sparking intense debate about the potential of the underlying policy, whether it should be tried again, and if so, how. Thus, this paper considers the viability of a publicprivate partnership approach from a for-profit provider’s perspective. To do so, we present a model to estimate the net present value (NPV) of a wireless network over a 10 year period by calculating costs based on the number of cell sites required and revenue based on the number of subscribers acquired using projections of market penetration each year. We apply this model to both a public-private partnership that serves commercial subscribers in addition to all public safety personnel on 20MHz of 700MHz spectrum, and a commercial-only network that serves just commercial subscribers on 10MHz