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Reach
Issue 7 2014
time it is pressed, which currently is
every six minutes in Great Britain.
»
»
Knowing you can press a button
and talk to many colleagues
within a group.
Whether there is a major incident or
a ‘business as usual’ occurrence,
our emergency services work
together on an ever increasing basis.
Maintaining the ability to communicate
seamlessly between emergency
organisations is just the beginning
of their unique needs. Collaborative
working is essential not only for the
services, but also for the supplier of
communications. Making sure that all
of the complex basics are in place to
enable responsive interoperability is
just the beginning of our emergency
services needs and requirements.
This short analysis highlights the
uniqueness of the communications
needs of our emergency services.
Needs which take significant design,
preparation, time, and testing to
address and provide.
A recent report by the American
National Telecommunications Public
Safety Council (NPSTC) on 22 May
2014 stipulates detailed guidance with
requirements and recommendations
that should be applied to their
National Public Safety Broadband
Network (NPSBN) and both existing
and new terrestrial radio systems.
Introducing the term ‘Public Safety
Grade’ the report outlines very detailed
specifications in order to mitigate the
risk presented by environmental and
manmade events as well as other
threats to the network.
It includes sections on reliability
and resilience, coverage, push to talk,
performance, scalability and security,
which contain best practice guidance
that applies not only to the private
NPSBN but also to any elements of
commercial networks that may be used
when shared facilities are utilised. This
report provides evidence to support
the importance of getting emergency
services communications right, as well
as showing what it takes to provide
mission critical communications as we
have examined earlier.
So what next for mission critical
communications technology? As
implied with the NPSTC report, with
communications for emergency
services being mission critical, the
technology used should be scrutinised
with appropriate standards applied to
govern them.
With significant change on the
horizon through the next technological
step change to long term evolution
(LTE) or 4G, emergency services will
be able to utilise data capabilities
and broadband functionality. LTE also
has the potential low latency feature
that most experts believe will, in time,
deliver the fast call set up speeds that
are required for the emergency services
mission critical voice application.
The standards required for LTE to
be used in the emergency service
arena, particularly in relation to voice
communication on 4G networks,
Extract from NPSTC report on public safety broadband
“Hurricane Sandy struck the East
Coast of the USA in 2012 and
all of the commercial wireless
communications networks
experienced varying degrees of
outage. There were several ‘lessons-
learned’ reports which showed
that 20 per cent of all commercial
wireless cell sites were out of
commission, some for many weeks,
leaving large areas without any form
of cellular communications. The
National Public Safety Broadband
Network (NPSBN) must be built
to Public Safety Grade (PSG)
standards. It is generally recognised
commercial broadband networks are
designed as ‘best effort’ networks
and are more prone to outages
during both natural and human
caused disasters, power outages,
and other events. The NPSBN, as well
as existing Land Mobile Radio (LMR)
systems, must be able to withstand
more severe natural and manmade
disasters and must also be capable of
being quickly repaired and/or quickly
place into service temporary network
components after one of these events.
“Today’s public safety voice
networks and existing LMR
systems are built to higher resiliency
standards than found in commercial
provider installations. They are
built to withstand natural and
manmade incidents – these events
typically correspond to high
risk to life and property and are
critical moments for public safety
communications. They have more
resilient systems and substantial
communications redundancy. [...]
it becomes paramount to ‘harden’
the NPSBN to achieve PSG service.
Therefore, it is critical that public
safety establish the requirements
to harden the NPSBN to PSG
– one that establishes a highly
available service during all hazards
and events.”
The report defines PSG as a
conceptual term that refers to the
expectation of emergency response
providers and practitioners that
their equipment and systems will
remain operational during and
immediately following a major
natural or manmade disaster on
a local, regional, and nationwide
basis. The term PSG in this
document is used to refer to
network hardening or network
sustainability.
Examining these debates
along with the needs of
our continually evolving
emergency services, has
suggested the best way
to move forward is with a
solution that balances the
mission critical benefits of a
dedicated network and the
cost advantages of
a commercial service
– a hybrid Network.
