The World According to Fletch™

Artificial intelligence is destined to be one of the most disruptive innovations that the public safety industry is likely to see. It is quickly becoming an essential component in many industries, and that includes public safety. However, these are still the nascent stages of AI adoption, and with that, come challenges. One is the so-called “black box,” problem, where human operators overseeing a system do not fully understand why the algorithms are recommending a particular action.

Wireless carrier T-Mobile has been fined over $19M for failure to connect 23,000 Emergency 911 calls during a recent network outage. In addition to leased fiber failures, software routing misconfiguration are supposedly to blame. 

While the bulk of the funding ($42.45 billion) allocated by the bill will go to the states for broadband grant programs, $14.2 billion has been dedicated to making an existing broadband subsidy program run by the Federal Communications Commission permanent.

 In the late 1960s, rock 'n' roll invaded the UK skirting regulators by broadcasting from a ship in international waters. In the US with high-powered Pirate Radio stations sent FM signals across the border from Mexico, frustrating government officials. India is now targeting Elon Musk's #Starlink program from sending signals into the country. #AirWaveWars

With technology moving forward at lightning speed, following the relevant trends may become a blurry streak of news and information flooding your inbox. Here are 10 significant trends that we feel are important, and will have the biggest impact on IT technology in the immediate future. Many you will already know about, and have heard before, but others will be new. In either case their significance will be noted, and you can make a decision on their relevance to your line of work.

No Jitter Contributing Editor, Industry analyst, and TalkingPointz creator Dave Michaels provide his assessment on the recently announced Ericson acquisition of Vonage that will join the company's 5G offerings with Enterprise CPaaS. The question now in front of us is: As an industry, have we wandered back into the "valley of the giants"? Dave thinks that we just may have. All my friends in the US, have a wonderful day giving thanks to our friends and families, on this Thanksgiving Day 2021.

More infrastructure investment to connect the unconnected on wired and wireless. Last week, investment firm Apollo Global Management unveiled a plan to deploy fiber to 3 million locations across the 20-state ILEC footprint that it acquired from Lumen Technologies earlier this year.

In last week's Open Meeting, the FCC approved a Second Report and Order to expand access to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by establishing the ability to text 988 to directly reach the Lifeline to better support at-risk communities in crisis, including youth and individuals with disabilities.

As the Federal Budget Bill bill goes through edits on the Senate side, funding for NG911 across the US hangs in the balance. What was once $12 billion has been whittled down to a token payment on Public Safety's future of $500 million. iCERT, the Industry Council for Emergency Response Technology, plays an important role in educating Congress on public safety needs and funding requests. George Keleman is iCERT's new Executive Director and sat down with me this weekend giving me his take on the subject.

After a couple of decades spent lost in space, satellites appear to be exciting investments once again – thanks in no small part to Elon Musk and the Starlink project he hopes will somehow pay for the colonization of Mars. Even celestial old-timers like Viasat and Inmarsat are maintaining their valuable real estate far above the planet.