Every day, public safety first responders — police officers, firefighters, medical emergency personnel, and others — are handicapped as they head to work: They have no way to easily communicate with one another. A remedy could soon be on the way.

Last week, the House of Representatives passed the 21st Century Emergency Coordination Act, which, if it becomes law, would instruct the Department of Homeland Security to coordinate communications for public safety emergencies.

For decades, communications among first responders was a subject of sitcoms, from “Car 54, Where Are You?” to “Andy of Mayberry.” Dominated by a few companies, public safety communications equipment manufacturing was a backwater business, and there was little expectation of cutting-edge technology being introduced.

One would expect that such problems would have been solved five years after the attacks of September 11 exposed a weakness in communications among first responders. They have not.

The police, fire, and emergency responders who could not communicate with each other on that tragic day still cannot effectively do so. Emergency workers in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina had a similar experience.

The challenges facing the public safety community are not merely finding enough money for a large contractor to throw at a complex problem. Public safety organizations face the following obstacles: local funding for equipment and training is often meager; there is scarce public safety spectrum allocated by the federal government and assigned by regional and state authorities; there is little capability for communicating and coordinating with other first responders around the country; agencies need to keep communications secure from hackers and organized criminals and terrorists, and there is an imperative to detect and to defeat, within the scope of prevailing law, the communications systems of terrorists and others who would harm local communities.

To date, the federal government has proposed, and even advanced, solutions to each of these challenges individually, but not as a whole.

Communications coordination is not new to the federal government. Since World War II, the American military has gone to war with a substantial advantage in communications and electronic warfare. No doubt, for several tens of billions of dollars, Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, or other defense systems integrators could craft a plan to coordinate communications among public safety first responders.

First responders often have two wireless phones: a personal phone purchased through one of dozens of competing wireless service vendors with state-of-the-art technology that works flawlessly, and a much more expensive, government-issued, secure public safety phone that works less well. Criminals, like hundreds of millions of ordinary Americans, have the latest commercial-grade wireless and even satellite services. Without any form of equipment standardization or dedicated spectrum allocation, criminals are able to easily interconnect with each other for voice and data traffic.

Practically every year, Congress passes bills to enhance public safety communications capabilities that would mandate more spectrum, more equipment, more training, more coordination. In fact, all but two members of the House voted for the 21st Century Emergency Coordination Act.Since 9/11, the first responder community has seen enormous efforts and even some progress on improved communications coordination.

But the commercial technology frontier, available to criminals and terrorists, moves more rapidly than that of the public safety community. With each passing year, public safety falls further behind the capabilities of its gravest challenges.

There is a growing recognition that 30,000 different governmental jurisdictions, each with some combination of police, fire, and emergency operations, cannot independently solve the communications coordination problem. Public safety communications coordination is a pressing problem. Some look to Washington for a centralized command-and-control system with government-specified equipment, spectrum, and protocols. That approach will likely fail technologically, and will certainly fail to be funded.

What is needed is the development of secure software systems to interconnect secure networks. This would enable specialized groups of public responders to talk to one another. The problem is neither the handset nor the spectrum nor the wireless service. The best approach is to rely on competitive commercial wireless and satellite service providers and equipment manufacturers to offer secure and high-performance variations on services they already offer to the general public.

We don’t know when the next 9/11 or Katrina will arrive. When it does, we need to be ready.

A former FCC commissioner, Mr.Furchtgott-Roth is president of Furchtgott-Roth Economic Enterprises. He can be reached at hfr@furchtgott-roth.com.