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Two years ago, Congress authorized the creation of a nationwide, high-speed network for public safety, dubbed FirstNet, as part of the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act signed into law in 2012.

Leveraging LTE (News - Alert) and using a nationwide spectrum license granted to it by the government, the hope and the promise of FirstNet is that it will provide a single platform for daily public safety communications and improve upon emergency services coordination.

The problem is that Congress only earmarked $7 billion for the project.

While estimates of the total cost to build the infrastructure for FirstNet range from $5 billion up to as much as $60 billion, most everyone agrees that $7 billion will be inadequate for the build-out.

Congress recognized as much, and the plan from the beginning has been to share the 20 MHz of contiguous spectrum in the 700 MHz band with commercial services – beachfront property in the world of radio spectrum.

While this could work for populated metropolitan areas through the use of dynamic spectrum arbitrage, which lets the emergency network share with commercial services but take priority when it needs bandwidth for disasters, rural areas present more of a problem. There’s little commercial use for LTE in areas that lack population, yet of course emergency services still need to cover these areas.

If no reliable fiber connection exists in an area, one has to be installed. But that’s an expense nobody is willing to pay.

That is except for the Federal Universal Service Fund and the E-rate program for schools and universities, perhaps.

In the past few months, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC (News - Alert)) has retooled its two longstanding subsidy programs so that they focus less on traditional telephone wiring and more on broadband access. With carriers in the middle of a switch to IP-based phone networks, this adjustment makes sense for the FCC.

But it also makes sense for FirstNet, because this infrastructure can enable the backhaul necessary for rural areas that might otherwise not have the economics to warrant infrastructure investment.

So, the FCC’s move from telephone wiring to broadband with these two programs could kill two birds with one stone, both delivering essential access and enabling FirstNet to reach a larger portion of the United States with its comparatively meager infrastructure funding.

Of course there still are many potential pitfalls along the way, but this looks to be a neat trick by the FCC.