Chris Sambar: AT&T Expects FirstNet Subscriber Growth Amid Emergency Response Efforts

Chris Sambar, a senior vice president at AT&T, has said the company’s efforts to fulfill communications support requests from FirstNet subscribers during 2018 attracted more public safety agencies to adopt the nationwide first-responder network, Urgent Communications reported Friday.

He noted the telecommunications firm has resolved 90 requests this year, four to six times higher than the number recorded last year.

Since April, AT&T responded to 70 emergencies and 20 large planned events, including the Boston Marathon. The company saw the number of its FirstNet subscribers increase from 3.6K to 250K agencies during the month of October.

“Seventy percent of those agencies were new customers that we did not have a previous relationship with, so they were coming from another carrier,” Sambar said.

“I believe that we will see this momentum continue and actually increase, as it has been over the past couple of months since those numbers were released,” he added.

AT&T earlier this year established a Response Operations Group to support the FirstNet program in deploying network assets during disasters or large incidents.