Who goes rst?
International Wireless Communications Expo (IWCE) gave the American public safety
communications community a chance to discuss many issues, with one of the most
pressing being when the rst agency will move from LMR to mobile broadband for
mission-critical voice. Sam Fenwick reports
This year in a welcome move, IWCE returned to
Las Vegas. For me, both the city and the venue
felt unchanged (I last attended the event two
years ago). However, one marked dierence was
the scale of Verizon’s presence at the show (both
on the exhibition oor and in the conference), which sent
the message that despite AT&T’s public-private partnership
with the First Responder Network Authority, its rival has no
intention of giving up without a ght.
Justin Blair, executive director, wireless business products
at Verizon, said “we want to oer a local experience, so
when there is an incident you can now manage the quality
of service, the priority and the pre-emption locally to make
sure the assets that are near an incident have the experience
and the network performance they need”. He was keen to
emphasise the benets that 5G will bring to public safety,
and that the combination of 5G and related technologies
such as edge computing will increase end-to-end availability
“not just in terms of the service” but also in terms of “the
application itself”. He also highlighted the benets that
could be unlocked in terms of battery life if the bulk of the
processing on smart devices is shifted to the network edge.
Pull or push?
One of the standout sessions was a panel discussion on the
journey to PTT over Cellular and MCPTT. e big question
was when public safety organisations would start to transition
from LMR to mission-critical broadband. Nicholas Falgiatore,
senior technology specialist at Mission Critical Partners,
noted that at some point agencies will have LMR network
components that will have reached end of life, forcing them
to decide whether they will invest millions of dollars into
upgrading their LMR system or opt to switch over to a
commercial provider. He added that once all costs are factored
in, two-way radios cost around $60-80/month/radio, while
cellular devices cost about $40-50/month/device. Given that
some rst-responders may have a portable radio, a mobile
radio, a cell phone and possibly a mobile connection on their
mobile data terminal, “monetarily that doesn’t make a whole
lot of sense and that’s the reason why at some point this the
transition to broadband is going to happen”.
Falgiatore also said that while a broadband service has to
provide “exactly the same thing but better than LMR if
an agency is going to consider migrating to a broadband
solution”, the diculty of this test varies. “If we’re talking
about a P25 Phase II system that gives 20dB in-building
coverage, that bar is pretty high. It’s not that high for
everybody, there’s a lot of users in rural America who don’t
have a 20dB system, they have one channel on a tower that
might give them 60 per cent mobile coverage.” He therefore
predicts that “you’re going to see some of those users within a
few years starting to make this decision”.
14 www.criticalcomms.com April Supplement 2019
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