Televate is proud of the fact that more states retained our firm through the 2013-2017 FirstNet-State consultation program than any of our national competitors. We were retained by 10 states/territories to provide comprehensive State and Local Implementation Grant Program (SLIGP) consulting services:
| Alabama | District of Columbia |
| Florida | Minnesota |
| North Dakota | Ohio |
| Oklahoma | Vermont |
| Virginia | Wisconsin |
Televate provided a variety of innovative services to our clients to support the FirstNet consultation process including, but not limited to, the following:
- Project planning, management, and technical and programmatic consulting
- Governance structure review
- Education and outreach
- Potential user identification
- Develop legal engagement instruments, including Memoranda of Agreement (MOA) and Memoranda of Understanding (MOU) documents
- Requirements gathering
- Statewide Communications Interoperability Plan (SCIP) recommendations
- Data collection
Program Highlights
Following are highlights from our work supporting states with the FirstNet consultation process:
Survey Development
Through direct and online survey methodologies, Televate collected user data about public safety broadband communications for several thousand individual public safety agencies across the country. This data armed our team and our client organizations with key user preference, behavior and market data that allowed them to effectively engage with FirstNet.
Requirements Development
Across our client base, we facilitated requirements development workshops in multiple states, assembling several hundred requirements for review of FirstNet’s State Plan. These requirements allowed decision-makers to articulate their respective State Plan objectives, and to communicate with FirstNet and their stakeholder base whether the proposed level of service satisfied the defined need of public safety.
Direct Outreach and Education
Our team has conducted hundreds of outreach and education meetings related to FirstNet across our client markets. These meetings included facilitated workshops, statewide and regional conferences and individual personal and agency meetings. All told, our core team members have performed direct outreach for FirstNet-related projects to several thousand public safety personnel, managers, elected officials and other stakeholders.
Consultation with FirstNet
Our firm assisted most of our SLIGP customers in direct consultation with FirstNet, engaging in meetings and negotiations prior to state acceptance of the State Plan. We worked directly with FirstNet and state senior officials, including the offices of several governors, in making the consultation process a success. In these consultation meetings, we achieved specific changes to the State Plan from FirstNet in direct response to state defined requirements.
Background on FirstNet:
The Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012 (“The Act”) created the federal First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet), and tasked them with building, operating, and maintaining the first high-speed, nationwide wireless broadband network dedicated to public safety (Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network, or NPSBN). To ensure that the network was designed to meet the needs of public safety, FirstNet was required to consult with Federal, state, tribal, and local public safety entities.