Reach
Issue 6 2014
|
25
The starting point is the definition
of ‘mission critical’ – which data
applications and voice services merit
the term? Blue light voice services are
almost always mission critical, because
they are used to manage, co-ordinate
and control incidents, but data, which
is visual, is less easy to categorise.
Police officers in the thick of an
unfolding riot situation may have no
time to look at data, whereas control
room personnel could use streaming
of live video reports of the situation to
deploy immediate back-up by issuing
instructions via a talk group, utilising
mission-critical voice.
The emergency services and all
other users of the Airwave Network
currently have access to specific
spectrum which is not available to
commercial users. With mission-
critical broadband capability on
the horizon, industry is lobbying for
continued dedicated spectrum, to
ensure users do not have to start
fighting consumers for bandwidth.
To help define the business case
for dedicated spectrum, we need
to consider how critical broadband
data services will affect the network.
If users can test and evaluate mobile
broadband applications, this will
catalyse ideas for the future. We all
know from our consumer services
that there are hundreds of thousands
of apps out there. But mission critical
ones? We need to identify and prove
the benefits.
Airwave is working with Surrey
Police on a mobile video pilot and
enablement of automatic number
plate recognition (ANPR) data
streaming, using Airwave’s 4GMax
solution. This uses the existing
commercial mobile networks to
deliver more bandwidth to vehicles, in
particular to address uplink capacity
to enable live video streaming
on critical data over LTE
