Florida BDA Compliance Deadlines Are Quickly Approaching

Will Washburn

4/15/23

When Senator Hooper introduced an amendment to Florida Statute 633.202 (18) to extend the compliance dates for BDA installation to January 1, 2025, I felt a sigh of relief for my clientele in South Florida. It gave us time to address all of the builds required to get compliant. The time was then to start the process of budgeting, contracts, plan check, and ultimately integration. The majority of my clients did not see it that way and kicked the can down the street, in favor of allocating the expense to future year budgets. Now there is a rush for the door and there are going to be thousands of buildings that will not make the deadline of being in the permit process by January 1, 2024, and being fully built by January 1, 2025. At the time I penned this article, there is 8 months left to get permits filed and 20 months left to get a system fully installed. That is a lot of heavy lifting for only a handful of Qualified Design Builders in the Florida market, with the requisite FCC and C13 licenses.

The City of Miami, for instance, has roughly 439 high-rise properties, of which less than 3% have been mitigated. With our experience and multiple successful builds in this market, I can assure you that the process in this jurisdiction takes time to navigate. With plan check & permitting, integration, commissioning, inspections and certifications, this process can take 6 to 9 months or longer. The actual build generally takes 90 days, however, plan check alone can take 3 – 6 months. I can only assume that with a current flood of new permit requests, this plan check process can take longer, depending on the City of Miami’s resources.

The high points of the design and build process are as follows:

1. Signal Survey / Benchmarking
2. Survey post-processing and extrapolation
3. Budgetary Proposals
4. Contract Phase
5. Design & Engineering
6. AHJ Radio Shop Approval
7. Plan Check Electrical / Fire
8. Permitting / Notice of Commencement
9. Equipment and Material Logistics
10. Scheduling elevator Closures for hoistway antennas
11. Contracting with elevator providers to access hoistways
12. Installing 2-hour rated pathways for donor antenna
13. Installing conduit pathways for distribution antennas
14. Installing Passive infrastructure for distributed antennas
15. Testing all of the Cable and Fiber
16. Installing Active equipment and circuits
17. Connecting alarms to fire Life Safety Panel
18. Electrical Inspection – Rough
19. Continuous Wave (CW) testing
20. System Commissioning
21. Adjusting attenuation and balancing power
22. Post-install grid test
23. File with FCC Part 90 registration
24. File retransmission agreement
25. Execute maintenance & monitoring agreements
26. Submit Close out package to the City of Miami Radio Shop
27. Radio shop inspection & signoff
28. Fire Inspection – Alarm
29. Electrical final

In summary, the time to get your property into this process was yesterday. Property owners/managers can no longer push this expense to future budgets and expect to be compliant in 2025. This is a highly specialized market and is not just about pulling cables and connecting antennas. BDA solutions require RF engineering prowess and these systems must be designed to keep the signal confined to the inside of the building. If coverage leaks outside the building it can cause interference and create oscillation, impairing the ability for firefighters and first responders from using their radios systemwide. For this reason, special attention and time for vendor selection must also be considered. Buyer beware as there are a lot of new entrants into this space that do not have the acumen and resources to successfully integrate these systems. A property owner’s first question to a vendor should be, “Have you built in this jurisdiction before?”

Will Washburn, is the CEO of Combined Operations for Digitechx Wireless Inc., a national provider of ERRCS and cellular services to the enterprise markets.

www.digitechx.com

info@digitechx.com