Huawei and IHS’s public safety LTE white paper

Huawei has partnered with HIS to develop a white paper titled ‘LTE in Public Safety’.

Released at the 4th eLTE Industry Alliance Summit, held on 30 May in Amsterdam, the white paper outlines customer challenges in the public safety sector and trends in private LTE network development, and makes recommendations for the deployment of LTE-based public safety networks.

According to the white paper, the global public safety sector is undergoing substantial transformation. Public sector agencies are looking to develop nationwide critical communications private networks to enhance their capabilities, such as enabling police departments to adopt visual command to predict and respond quickly to incidents.

Visual dispatching within the public safety sector requires significant bandwidth. Current narrowband technologies, including analog and digital, are unable to support this demand. Therefore, the public safety sector has begun to develop private LTE broadband networks which integrate voice, data and video services to meet the demand for public safety applications.

Driven by this trend, some vendors have already rolled out private LTE network communications solutions designed for the public safety sector, indicating the importance of LTE broadband networks to enable critical communications in the future.

The white paper provides a comprehensive analysis on private LTE networks in the public safety sector, including market scale, technology development trends, standards development, spectrum planning in major global regions and the influence of industry organisations. Based on this in-depth analysis, the white paper also provides practical recommendations on network deployment policies, industry chain development and market growth.

“Private LTE networks have been growing rapidly in recent years. The market scale of private LTE networks in the public safety sector reached over US$539 million in 2015,” said Thomas Lynch, co-author of the white paper and director of IHS Critical Communications Group.

“IHS forecasts that the market scale of private LTE eNodeB in the sector will reach US$1.3 billion by 2019. IHS’s long-term forecast data shows that the growth rate of private LTE networks will be even higher. Private LTE network systems are expected to be adopted by more than one million users by 2021.”

By the end of Q1 2016, Huawei had signed 180 eLTE network contracts and established 84 commercial eLTE networks across different sectors, such as public safety, transportation and energy. Its eLTE broadband trunking solution has been deployed for a number of projects, including the Nanjing e-Government network, Shanghai Police, Kenyan police, Zhengzhou metro and Addis Ababa light rail.

Pictured: Thomas Lynch, IHS and Jianhua Peng, Huawei.