Welcome to November 2020. The election is finally behind us, COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc in the United States, and the number of wildfires, major storms, and hurricanes continue to make our first responders’ work even more essential. When FirstNet was created in February of 2012, it was a result of the public-safety community having banded together across disciplines. The Public Safety Alliance (PSA) sought and received support from a variety of organizations including governors, mayors and most LMR venders.

Erillisverkot, the Finnish state-run body responsible for national communications networks, for public authorities, emergency services and other critical services added Ericsson Security Manager to its Virve 2.0 5G core network public-safety network. The move is part of a mission-critical public safety partnership with Ericsson.

The FCC granted a waiver request from Piper Networks that will allow the company to certify and operate its ultrawideband (UWB) train positioning system in the 4.243 – 4.743 GHz band in New York City and Harris County, Texas.

TCCA announced the winners of the 2020 International Critical Communications Awards (ICCA), which took place during the virtual Critical Communications Week.

NextNav the availability of its software development kit (SDK) for the Pinnacle vertical positioning service on the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet) API Catalog, which is a curated catalog of public-safety-relevant application programming interfaces (APIs) and SDKs.

A group of seven public-safety organizations filed a joint response in opposition to CTIA’s request for reconsideration of the FCC’s sixth report and order (R&O) on E9-1-1 location accuracy requirements.

ESChat announced it completed a migration of all its U.S. based public-safety customers to the Amazon AWS GovCloud environment. The migration was the final step in a suite of enhancements required for the company to facilitate nationwide interagency push-to-talk (PTT) communications between ESChat customers and traditional LMR users.

The second of the three-phase BroadWay Precommercial Procurement (PCP) began on 6 July when the group of procurers awarded contracts to three consortia that met all the technical and quality requirements of the call-off competition at the end of the first phase. In the second phase, the prototype phase, the consortia are led by Airbus DS, Frequentis and Leonardo.

Nextlink Internet selected BEC Technologies for its fixed wireless Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) deployments.

The Fifth European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) MCX Plugtests saw a 95% success rate in its testing. While three of the previous four plugtests events were held in person and the fifth was originally planned to be in-person, the fifth event was held virtually because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.