Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Apr 27, 2011 4:01 PM, By Donny Jackson
Considerable effort is being made to get public-safety 700 MHz LTE networks deployed in pockets of the country today, in the hope that they can be linked together with similar networks nationwide to give first responders throughout the U.S. access to broadband capabilities. ...
...push-to-talk over a network is one thing, but push-to-talk communication that works off the network is a critical feature for first responders, particularly for firefighters. Again, such peer-to-peer transmissions are possible from a technical standpoint — ad-hoc mesh technologies have been commercially available for years, and the military has invested significant resources to ensure that the approach can meet mission-critical reliability requirements. ...
..."What are [public safety's peer-to-peer] requirements? Is it just voice? Do you need to text? Do you need some telemetry?" Olbrich said. "We don't have those requirements. So, for us to go to a 3GPP or anything, they're going to come back at us and say, 'What are your requirements? What do you need to do? What's your end goal?'
"We don't know what that is. I'm not sure public safety does quite yet. We hear a lot of talk and a lot of marketing spiel, but we really need to peel that back by two or three layers to get to the tasks we really need to accomplish." ...

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