Jeff Bratcher brings a deep background of both private and public sector communications technical experience to the FirstNet team. That’s why we are pleased that he has joined FirstNet as the Deputy Chief Technical Officer (DCTO). Among his many duties, Jeff will manage and oversee the engineering teams that are developing specifications to ensure the successful deployment of a nationwide public safety broadband network. He is based out of FirstNet’s technical headquarters in Boulder, CO, and reports to Ali Afrashteh, FirstNet’s Chief Technical Officer.
If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Jeff had been the acting DCTO under a detail assignment from the Department of Commerce (DOC) since November of 2013. He was the Division Chief for the Telecommunications and IT Planning Division at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) and also served as the Technical and Operations Manager for the Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) program, which is a joint program with NTIA/ITS and the DOC National Institute of Standards and Technology Communications Technology Lab (NIST/CTL).
As DCTO, Jeff remains focused on staffing the CTO organization and working closely with many of his former colleagues at the PSCR program on many technical projects that support FirstNet efforts in the areas of standards; testing and evaluation; and modeling and simulation. Jeff says he looks forward to utilizing his decade of experience at PSCR as an objective technical advisor to public safety practitioners to accelerate the adoption and implementation of the most critical public safety communication standards and technologies into FirstNet. The key responsibilities and members of the PSCR technical teams are described in more detail below:
• Standards: The team works within the worldwide standards organizations developing key features and requirements, specifications, and standards that first responders have requested be built into the public safety broadband network over the long term to meet their mission-critical communication needs. PSCR staff involved include Andy Thiessen; Randy Bloomfield; David Cypher; Sheila Frankel; Nelson Hastings; Bruce Ward; Ken Tilley; and Al Vincent.
• Testing and evaluating: This team is testing public safety LTE vendor products and services to identify gaps between the state-of-the-art and desired states relative to public safety differentiators such as quality of service, priority, and preemption. PSCR staff involved includes Tracy McElvaney; Kameron Behnam; Todd Bohling; Jon Cook; Sam Gomez; Rob Stafford; Ted Mullen; John Ewan.
• Modeling and Simulation: This team will be involved in the planning and design of networks before deployment, to assess the performance of features and capabilities not yet implemented in products, and to investigate network scalability. The PSCR staff involved include Nada Golmie; Camillo Gentile; David Griffith; Wen-bin Yang; Richard Rouil; Michael Souryal.
The technical teams will also be supporting the Broadband Technology Opportunity Projects (BTOP) in Los Angeles, CA; New Mexico; Adams County, CO; and New Jersey. While these are independent activities funded by the NTIA BTOP grant program, Jeff and the technical team will be capturing lessons learned from each for FirstNet integration. Finally, FirstNet’s engineering staff will define the technical strategy behind major FirstNet Requests for Proposals (RFPs).
Jeff began his federal service with NTIA/ITS in 2003 and received the Department of Commerce Gold Medal award in 2006 and Silver and Bronze Medal awards in 2011 for his efforts related to public safety communications research and development for the PSCR program. Prior to joining federal service, Jeff worked for ten years in the private sector at Motorola Cellular and Siemens Mobile in their respective field deployment engineering teams. He supported and led engineering teams that launched the first CDMA and GSM based digital cellular and broadband systems in domestic and international markets.
