Why LTE will replace LMR for public safety - Urgent Communications article

[MtnBiker2005]

Why LTE will replace LMR for public safety - Urgent Communications article

A groundswell has emerged in support of the notion that provisioning mission-critical voice to first responders over broadband networks is a fait accompli — and that the eventual end of land-mobile radio is a certainty.

It is no longer a question of “if,” but of “when.” But while there seems to be little doubt that it can be done, no one seems to know with certainty which of the myriad potential paths should be taken to make it a reality.
http://urgentcomm.com/mobile_voice/mag/lte-will-replace-lmr-201108/

 

[MtnBiker2005]

[Forgot to add this link in the first post]


LTE Support for Mission Critical Voice for Public Safety
06.19.2011 by Andrew M. Seybold
http://andrewseybold.com/2532-lte-support-for-mission-critical-voice-for-public-safety

Some LTE Question & comments in this topic.

RR Topic: http://forums.radioreference.com/industry-discussion/218645-lte-public-safety-question.html

 

[jim202]

This ground swell of interest and being the answer to all for interoperability may not last long. My gut feeling is that like the ocean that laps up on the beach, the waves die out a short distance from the water's edge. Let us see just how far this surge goes as it moves into the heart land of the country. It may work well in the city areas, but it won't last long in the rural areas.

Let us see just who has the correct writing on the wall on this new trend.

 

[MTS2000des]

Will it happen? maybe in 20 years, but it's vaporware at this point, and the problem right now is funding. The biggest drawback to being a subscriber on someone else's network is just that: you're just another customer and you're paying to use someone else's system.

If you recall back in the late 1990's, Southern Company pushed hard selling their iDEN system to governments and some public safety customers, biggest one was the city of Birmingham. After several years of dealing with glitches, and paying large sums of money for airtime, they scrapped SoCo and bought their own traditional LMR (Astro digital) 800MHz DTRS.

The push right now (at least around here) is to expand and interconnect the existing P25 700/800 systems, to create a regional public safety voice system. Once this finally gets complete (which is 5-8 years out), we'll still be paying it off. Replacing it with LTE and paying to be on someone else's system is just flat out retarded. We're already going for broke furloughing government employees to pay for the expensive hardware we just bought.

 

[smokeybehr]

I'll just point to the Charlie Foxtrot that is the BayRICS LTE project and say that any LTE deployment had better be far more well thought out and organized than that.

 

[902]

Don't hold your breaths.

Topology:
For one, LTE has no "direct" mode, so for everything it does or does not do, it's infrastructure dependent. To talk to the guys on the other side of the wall, you are not talking directly to their radio, but to some eNodeB somewhere (and, if you're bleeding out or running out of air, let's hope you can make it there). We also know what happens to infrastructure dependent systems under duress. WTC and Katrina proved that anything elaborate just wasn't there.

Operations:
How do you receive reports of network surveillance? For example, the local eNodeB point of presence (the IT folks won't let us call them base stations anymore) goes down. Your coverage is impaired. Is your agency notified of the impairment? What's the TTR (time to restoration)? Who's coming out? What's the contingency plan when your hand-held device bonks out? What's ISO think of that model (and what ever will happen to insurance rates when everyone is a subscriber on Public Safety Tel)?

Ergonomics and Decision Making:
So we can stream video from every device. Okay. Looking at a popular TV commercial, the FDNY EMS EMT shows the patient to a doctor on his smart phone. At what point does information become superfluous? How can we handle 10,000 simultaneously streaming videos from 10,000 officers deployed at an incident streaming into a fusion center? How do you figure out what's relevant? Will someone be directing the officer from the "switchboard" thus removing all the discretion of actually being there? What of the trauma team that is now treating kinematics and statistical probabilities of injury from a print-out rather than treating the patient in front of them? Will we make medicine a parallel to board-swapping technicians?

And Spectrum Givebacks:
I'm not sure who elected a spokesperson who was empowered to give back in-use spectrum for auction, but it certainly wasn't me or anyone I know.

We have a few details to work out before that Dick Tracy Wrist TV the talking heads want is running on LTE.

 

[zz0468]

Don't hold your breaths...

...We have a few details to work out before that Dick Tracy Wrist TV the talking heads want is running on LTE.

We can only hope that the decision maker's heads are screwed on as straight as yours was while writing your post.

 

[Mike_G_D]

We can only hope that the decision maker's heads are screwed on as straight as yours was while writing your post.

I'm not terribly religious but, in regards to this - AMEN!

-Mike

 

[MTS2000des]

I can tell you this from working in one of the major trauma hospitals in my state, WE DON'T HAVE TIME to sit here and play teenaged messaging games on a Smartphone or look at charts from EMT's calling in PCR's on a tablet! We barely can get folks to respond to the radio or phone sometimes because they are busy stopping a bleedout or tending to half a dozen criticals at once.

Technology is nice, but practicality is what gets the job done.

 

[DaveNF2G]

Newspapers, AM radio, television, etc., are all still around, even though the next big technological toy was going to make them obsolete.

 

[talkpair]

It is no longer a question of “if,” but of “when.”

The 10 year anniversary of the twin towers event that triggered the push for interoperability is almost here, and it's still not a reality for many agencies.

This should give everyone an idea of where "when" is.

WE DON'T HAVE TIME to sit here and play teenaged messaging games on a Smartphone or look at charts from EMT's calling in PCR's on a tablet!

My guess is that this perceived need for all these technologies come from people outside the profession itself, or have spent little or no time in the profession.

 

[Thayne]

My guess is that this perceived need for all these technologies come from people outside the profession itself, or have spent little or no time in the profession.

Right on, and oftentimes a lot of human beings cannot understand the three words "Less is more"; they only think that more is better---