Redwood City resident Stewart Kantor leads Full Spectrum, a company that builds private networks for first responders and utility companies so they are not reliant on cellular networks during a crisis.

What is your product? Basically, we create a completely private wireless system that’s only accessible by the people who run the network.

How can it help in a crisis? Cellphone systems are designed to only have a small portion of their customers use it at once, but in a crisis, the first thing people do is pick up their cellphones, and that overloads the system. This would be a private IP network that only mission-critical people can use, and it survives many of the problems that cellular networks have during a crisis.

But don’t many first responders already have a radio? The systems the first responders use today is pretty much just mobile voice, but they use cell networks for data. What we do is both voice and mobile data.

How does the technology work? We use abandoned frequencies from the FCC — frequencies that have low commercial value, but have very high value to first responders.