On with the show
Philip Mason looks at the major themes on the British APCO side of the conference
schedule at this year’s BAPCO/Critical Communications Europe 2019
As might be expected, much of the emphasis
in the BAPCO part of the Coventry 2019
conference programme was on the roll-out of
burgeoning – and in some cases, even currently
operational – national LTE networks for
public safety. One crucial dierence this year, however, was a
noticeable shift in the tone of the discourse, particularly on
the American side, away from ‘will it work?’ to ‘what benets
will the systems bring in the long term?’.
is included a fair chunk of material looking at, still fairly
amorphous, concepts such as the ‘connected rst-responder’,
whose life, it’s anticipated, will become considerably easier
thanks to the availability of markedly increased bandwidth,
low latency and so on.
Possibly more intriguing, however, were remarks referring
to an anticipated shift in the market itself, in particular
around how widespread leveraging of public safety LTE
could hasten closer ties with manufacturers, and even
crossover between the development of commercial and public
safetyequipment.
Rather than the traditional Emergency Services Network
update – although we did get one of those, at the start of day
two – this year’s conference programme kicked o with half
an hour from the acting CEO of FirstNet, Ed Parkinson. In
his keynote address, he discussed ‘Global co-operation and
co-ordination for public safety wireless programmes’, taking
in several of the themes mentioned above.
Parkinson began his presentation by giving an overview
of the current adoption of FirstNet across the US, with the
network having been up and running for around nine months
– albeit minus the Holy Grail of mission-critical push-to-talk
(MCPTT) functionality. is includes more than 425,000
public safety users working for more than 5,250 agencies,
who signed up having been compelled by nothing more than
the “leveraging of market forces”.
Continuing on the latter theme, as well as the broader
implications of the adoption of LTE as a whole, he said: “We
see in the US how public safety broadband is being used
every single day, by every public safety user. Some of that
is commercial grade and some of it is FirstNet, but that’s
the direction in which the market is going, and it’s going to
beirreversible.
“We’re already starting to see a dramatic shift in the direction
that folks are thinking from an investment perspective. From
our market research, for instance, we predict that over the next
two decades, public safety broadband will be about a $600bn
market. Global smart cities, meanwhile, which is something
else we’re having to think about very seriously, will be worth
around $2.2trn over the next 15 years.”
Keeping the above gures in mind, he said public safety
now has to be viewed “holistically” (rather than “myopically”),
looking in particular at potential links between education,
healthcare, emergency management and so on. He also
suggested that FirstNet would be maintaining close ties
with industry going forward, so that when a new product is
developed for commercial use, a discussion can also be had
Programme
director Bryan
Clark gave an
ESN update
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