While it’s stating the obvious to say that applications will increasingly have to interwork across traditional technology boundaries, Peter Hudson, senior product manager at Sepura, emphazises the benefits immediately available from applications now – and also the importance of understanding the wider and ‘softer’ human and organisational environments in which they’ll be used. “While applications is definitely the buzzword of the moment, it’s important that the user community doesn’t hesitate while waiting for broadband LTE networks to be rolled out”, he says. “There’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

That 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. There’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. “They 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. The 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: “That the future’s going to involve the use of what you might call ‘heavy data’ isn’t in doubt. There’s already considerable discussion underway in both business and government sectors about how ‘big data’ – the mass 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. Those 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. The openness and global nature of the 3GPP standards behind LTE is going to greatly simplify these types of interconnection.”
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