Global Public Safety Trends
One of the interesting things that has occurred in the Public Safety communications industry is that despite the decreased opportunity for travel and face to face interactions the number of meetings, conferences and working groups has continued and in some instances increased in 2021.
Through the organisations we engage with it is clear that developing cellular capability whilst maintaining LMR systems is a common approach across many European and North American countries to support communications for emergency services. This is subtle change from 2018/2019 thinking where the major theme was to evolve all emergency services communications to cellular based technologies and decommission aging LMR capability.
Another shift in strategic thinking is to discriminate between data and application usage of cellular networks from push-to-talk (PTT) services that might be delivered over these same networks.
This has resulted in many countries accelerating the delivery of priority and pre-emption capability to support data and application usage for tablet and smartphone applications whilst at the same time a softening of the delivery priority of cellular based push-to-talk services aka MCPTT. Key to the change in delivery priorities is the recognition of importance of the requirement for voice as a capability of last resort and the concern around both the resiliency of cellular networks and capability under failure of the cellular networks.
Resiliency of commercial cellular networks is a concern raised by a number of critical industries including power/water/gas utility providers, rail networks and coastal maritime organisations as well as the Public Safety sector. What is emerging is discussion by these industries with government regulatory bodies about legislative opportunities to improve commercial cellular network resiliency. We have not seen any specific legislation changes on commercial cellular network resiliency yet.
When it comes to legislation related to the cellular industry as well as discussions about resiliency improvements there are a number of areas that governments are either considering, have changes underway or in some cases legislation changes have occurred.
These include;
Changes to building codes to mandate support for antenna systems to improve inbuilding coverage of either/both LMR and Cellular. This is similar to the legislation for sprinklers.
Creation of legislation to enable emergency services to have priority on commercial cellular networks over other customer traffic. This is to counter earlier legislation regarding Net Neutrality.
Legislation that mandates the support of domestic roaming by commercial cellular network operators
Legislation to mandate that all govt funded infrastructure such as roads, rail and tunnels systems deliver connectivity (fibre) or power infrastructure to support the delivery of cellular services.
Allocation of cellular spectrum for exclusive use by emergency services.
The support of rich data including location, image and video directly from emergency callers at emergency call answering points and emergency services dispatch centres. The standardisation of formats as well as retention policies are all needing to be considered. There is also the issue of deep fake image/video generation that also needs to be considered and how existing regulations will deal with this.
The Public Safety communications industry continues to evolve with a greater reliance on commercial network services whilst identifying areas that require improvement in reliability and resiliency. It’s been a busy 2021 keeping across and participating in public safety and critical communications industry meetings, conferences and working groups. We look forward to an even greater engagement with the international public safety and critical communications industry in 2022.