The impetus for FirstNet grew out of an aspect of the September 11 narrative that is part tragedy and part urban myth.

One hundred twenty-one firefighters perished when the second tower at the World Trade Center collapsed. Supposedly, this was because police commanders, whose helicopters had the best view of how damaged the building was, were unable to communicate with fire commanders to warn them to get their people out. In the weeks after the attacks, the communications breakdown was simplified in the press—and even among first-responder experts newly recruited to Tom Ridge’s White House staff whom I talked with at the time—as the inability of police and firefighters to communicate with one another on their radios. “It’s crazy for the cops on the scene not to be able to talk to the firefighters” became the rallying cry around a new cause: interoperability.

However, problems with fire-department communications mostly had to do with the inability of fire commanders to communicate with their troops because repeater devices installed in the Trade Center to enable two-way radios to penetrate the building’s thick walls and work from its high floors failed in the intense fire. Whether police and fire commanders were coordinating with one another sufficiently in a command center—an issue raised in later investigations—has nothing to do with whether police and firefighters in the building should have been able to talk on interoperable radios.

There are certainly some situations when interoperability is necessary, especially in major metropolitan areas, where first responders from multiple jurisdictions will swarm a dire emergency. But New York, Los Angeles, and other large jurisdictions have long since established protocols and bought technology that solve the problem. The combined forces are now able to plug into one another’s systems without waiting for FirstNet’s grand solution, which would allow all first responders to communicate over an emergency-response system established with specially reserved bandwidth across every inch of the 50 states.

Moreover, as cellphone technology advanced (including phones that use press-to-talk features, much like cops’ walkie-talkies do), the interoperability argument began to lose its luster. Skeptics pointed out that everyone could now talk to everyone through their cellphones—and that various apps could easily establish user groups of first responders.

The justification for FirstNet shifted more to problems of bandwidth: The first responders needed their own network because in true calamities, such as in Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, consumer bandwidth is overwhelmed, causing calls to be blocked or dropped. That’s true, but other technology now allows for designated users to get bandwidth priority in an emergency.

Yet another argument that emerged was that even if big metropolitan areas had largely solved these problems on their own, rural responders still needed help, both with interoperability and with setting up cell towers across vast regions where cell service does not now extend and where firefighters dealing with increasingly horrendous wildfires have perished for lack of communication. FirstNet is requiring bidders to provide exactly that kind of ubiquitous service across the far reaches of rural America.