applications
hesitate while waiting for broadband LTE networks to be rolled out”, he says. “Tere’s a great deal that can be achieved with the current narrowband service of TETRA – such as the police using a WAP browser to push photos of suspects or missing children out to individual officers. It’s going to be a long time before LTE is in any way ubiquitous and there’s always going to be a need for fall back onto narrowband. Any solutions will have to recognize that.” And he adds: “While, for example, some police forces have
equipped their staff with PDAs, the benefits have been limited and they’re now dropping them. Users often saw the cost of the device as their only overhead, not properly understanding that many of the applications that they were looking to exploit would require significant expense in integration work in the back office environment and very probably changes in well- established operational procedures. For very good reasons, the public safety community is often very conservative.”
Room for growth Tat innate conservatism, usually based on years of tradition and established working practices that have proved historically successful in life-threatening situations, is under pressure to change from more than just the introduction of new technologies like LTE. As Jussi Simolin, senior manager at Cassidian observes, “One over-arching trend that’s happening around the world involves the closure and consolidation of multiple emergency control centres and networks that might have grown up over the years to specifically support different regions or services. Tere’s going to be considerable room for growth in applications here as common workflows and procedures become more shared and standardized. “It’s also being recognized that what were once regarded
as ‘emergency services’ are now playing far wider roles in our societies than just responding to life-critical situations”, he suggests. “Tey often need to access far wider and more diverse types of supporting information to give them the situational awareness to do their jobs efficiently. Complementing this, the citizens themselves have also become much more connected and enabled when it comes to interacting with their own public safety organizations. Te applications environment has to evolve to recognize this. “Finally”, he adds, “there will inevitably be major changes
to the ways that applications are developed and delivered. Historically, these have often been created by small, very localized and highly specialized companies. Given the growing awareness of the need for easy integration and a reassessment of the total costs of ownership of highly customized systems that involve specialised maintenance or expensive upgrades, it’s clear that customers are going to be looking for solutions that exploit open standards and cheaper platforms.” If there’s one trend that does seem clear as far as the future
of applications is concerned, then that involves their ability to increase situational awareness – and it’s here that the higher bandwidths that can be delivered by LTE systems have the potential to truly revolutionize working practices. Steve Jennings, executive director at Alcatel-Lucent, sees two key areas emerging here: “Tat the future’s going to involve the use of what you might call ‘heavy data’ isn’t in doubt. Tere’s already considerable discussion underway in both business and government sectors about how ‘big data’ – the mass
Issue 7 2012 TE TRA TODAY ‘ While applications is definitely the
buzzword of the moment, it’s important that the user community doesn’t hesitate while waiting for broadband
of information that now exists out there in networks and databases about, for example, people’s buying or travel habits – can be best used for marketing and social planning purposes. “If we apply similar principles in the public safety sphere,
it’s easy to see how big data – including mapping, video feeds and all the necessary metadata needed for management purposes – can be used to provide augmented reality solutions to decision makers”, he adds. “With LTE, we now also have the possibility of delivering that information directly and visually to responders on the ground and provide overlays appropriate to their particular operation. Tose sources of potentially useful information are already growing as buildings, environmental systems or pieces of equipment themselves become ‘intelligent’ and become connected to wider networks, allowing responders to link directly in to these systems. Te openness and global nature of the 3GPP standards behind LTE is going to greatly simplify these types of interconnection.”
In the short term It’s clear though that, for the short term at least, the ‘killer applications’ in the mission-critical sector will remain voice and appropriate narrowband data applications. Tom Quirke, vice-president at Motorola reminds us, “While work is obviously well underway on LTE, most customers in the public safety area still see what might be called ‘eyes up’ voice communications as their prime requirement – with all the strengths implicit to TETRA of encryption, group calling and an instantaneous connection. What focus there is here on applications more usually involves automating and data- enabling processes that would historically have involved extra voice traffic such as police identity, vehicle checks or report writing and the aim here is to save time and money. “Tere’s obviously a massive chasm between these types of
application and those services, such as video, that broadband makes possible”, he adds. “As we make the journey, we’re obviously going to have to replicate many of the strengths and functions that make TETRA so useful – such as slaving off and synchronising with existing talkgroup structures – while the need for device longevity, robustness and ease of use and training will also require careful thought.” As a final word, for applications to be successful, both
vendors and users must be aware of what is becoming possible in this new infinitely connected world through increased interworking and sharing of skills and insights. Gert Jan R Wolf, founder of the TETRA-Applications website, comments: “Te TETRA applications community has been very fragmented and localised with many small specialist technology companies needing help to get access to wider markets. In the 18 or so months since we launched the site, we’ve seen traffic constantly grow with over 350 companies now with a presence – and over 3500 registered users. Te metabolism of this part of the TETRA community is finally speeding up!”
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First steps towards an app future are already being taken by the UK service provider UK Broadband, which carried out a public safety exercise with Hampshire Fire and Rescue involving co- ordinated responses to disasters using mesh architectures and video. A wider series of trials involving integrated broadband video and decision support applications is also being carried out under the EC’s €14 million Emergency Support System (ESS) project
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