Under the agreement with the FirstNet Authority, AT&T has five years to complete the contracted deployment of the FirstNet system, beginning with a start date of March 2018, when the FirstNet Authority issued the first network-construction task order. If AT&T is able to reach the 80% buildout threshold by the end of March this year, it would be a full year ahead of the contracted deployment schedule.

The 1 million FirstNet connections and the 10,000 first-responder agencies using FirstNet are figures that AT&T announced in December, when the company also said it had completed 75% of the contracted buildout for FirstNet.

A federal General Accountability Office (GAO) report released publicly this week provided some additional details about adoption of the FirstNet system. As many sources within the public-safety community have suspected, the 43-page GAO report confirms that many agencies adopting FirstNet may have only a handful of connections, “which may indicate piloting of the network,” based on interviews conducted primarily in 2019.
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