New test centre to help shape future of mission-critical comms

Motorola Solutions has opened a one million euro mission-critical solutions centre at its UK headquarters to support the evolution of mission-critical communications for public safety organisations.

The demonstration centre showcases voice and data public safety solutions, including the integration of TETRA (terrestrial trunked radio) and broadband technologies. With multi-device, multi-network support, Motorola Solutions demonstrates the advantages of combining voice and data to deliver the information public safety professionals require to plan and execute an efficient response.

‘Emergency services respond to terrorist bomb threat’ is just one of many public safety test scenarios that combine LTE (long-term evolution) mobile broadband and TETRA digital radio for mission-critical voice and data enhanced applications

The facility has been designed specifically to address the need for new applications and services that will support emergency service personnel.

Paul Steinberg, senior vice-president and chief technology officer at Motorola Solutions, explained: “The combination of TETRA and 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) standards-based high-speed LTE mobile data networks for mission-critical communications will have tremendous implications for the way that public safety is delivered in the future, from new devices that securely capture and communicate data, to ingestion and management of new forms and levels of intelligence. What becomes important is the ability to secure a single operational view that can then be successfully communicated in real-time for a unified response. Motorola Solutions’ mission-critical solutions centre enables the most useful features from both TETRA and LTE applications in order to generate the next advances in public safety.”

Mission-critical communications are undergoing a significant evolution as governments and public safety organisations begin preparations to add 3GPP standards-based LTE technology to existing TETRA environments.

With TETRA Enhanced Data Service (TEDS), early adopters of TETRA already have access to mission-critical data services, including situational awareness video. To cater for higher bandwidth data applications, such as high-definition video, and to support the wider use of data, public safety agencies are now looking at refreshing their networks and adding LTE.

Incorporating a working command and control centre with live TETRA and LTE mobile broadband feeds, the solutions centre offers the flexibility to support the development of applications and services that deploy both TETRA and LTE together, or LTE as a standalone public safety environment.

Data gathering from cameras, smartphones and social media is providing new levels of intelligence, but also generating new challenges. The new centre demonstrates how agencies can manage this increased flow of data and then extract useful intelligence. This can then be applied to meet operational demands – replicated within the facility – such as incident creation, resource allocation, mobilisation, information analysis and distribution of real-time intelligence to manage and then control an incident.