The long and winding road to 5G

On the eve of Comms Connect Wellington, we spoke with Quixoticity’s Peter Clemons to dig into his vision for the future of public safety and the critical communications sector. Clemons’ keynote presentation, ‘Critical communications at the edge — can we leap from 2G to 5G in as few steps as possible?’ will cover a broad range of technologies that are set to shake up our industry.

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Critical Comms: How do you see the current situation of public safety and critical communications around the world?

Peter Clemons: Over the past decade or so, our industry has moved onto digital platforms to deliver mission-critical communications to professional users. This has been an important step forwards that has helped network integration, interoperability and the emergence of new services and applications beyond the traditional push-to-talk group call functionality of the past.

We must now build on this important step by providing more advanced capabilities without giving up all the great features offered by TETRA, in particular, but also P25 and DMR, depending on the geographical location and user requirements. The status quo is no longer an option as we prepare for the most radical transformation of daily life, societies and economies during the 2020s.

CC: Are standards such as TETRA and P25 now reaching end-of-life? Can LTE replace them for mission-critical operations?

PC: As we start taking a much closer look at emerging standards such as LTE, Wi-Fi and the next generation of so-called convergent 5G standards, it is important to remember that today, and probably for many years to come, TETRA and P25 will remain the best possible options for delivering mission-critical voice and data applications. However, having said that, it is becoming more and more important to reduce the operational costs of digital PMR networks and start preparing control rooms, ICT systems and transmission networks for future applications.

CC: How can traditional manufacturers remain relevant when global suppliers and large commercial operators have access to much greater resources and the ability to deploy solutions for the mass market?

PC: It is imperative for the critical communications industry to participate in the various global standardisation processes such as 3GPP and IEEE in order to make sure that mission-critical services and applications are included in future releases. We have spent about the past five years or so trying to influence 3GPP LTE, particularly Releases 12 and 13, and we have been very successful, although there is always more work to be done.

The public safety community has been very active in the standards process and a new group has even been created within 3GPP — SA6 — to focus on delivering a mission-critical PTT (MCPTT) standard that can be adopted by governments that are moving towards public safety LTE (PS-LTE) solutions.

I firmly believe that the so-called 5G, Smart/Safe City and Internet of Things (IoT) requirements can only be met by placing privacy, public safety and network security/integrity (ie, critical communications) at the very core of next-generation networks.

Quixoticity’s Peter Clemons.

CC: Commercial operators are starting to play a much larger role in public safety networks. Do you see this as a positive development?

PC: I believe that it is still the role of strong, security-conscious governments to set the rules for public safety communications, to listen closely to what first responders require to carry out their daily routines as well as being able to respond when disaster strikes. Governments must find new ways of funding highly reliable, redundant, resilient mission-critical networks that offer adequate service to officers all the way to the edge of the network.

Clearly, in today’s hyper-connected world, commercial operators connect and provide a valuable service to millions of subscribers, but there must be a clear division between commercial and public safety networks in terms of both spectrum, network capacity and applications.

I believe that when 5G becomes a reality, we will see lots of new business and operational models for metropolitan, suburban and rural areas that will provide much more resilience than is currently possible with highly centralised, best-effort commercial LTE networks.

CC: What will this future 5G world look like and how might it change the critical communications landscape?

PC: Since the introduction of the iPhone under 9 years ago, the global mobile industry has seen increased innovation and disruption. We see industries that were previously totally separated from each other converging at a startling pace. The mobile internet is now a reality as most people on this planet now access online content via a smartphone, rather than a desktop or laptop computer.

We see advances in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) that will change the way we perceive the world, leading to specific applications within public safety. The Internet of Things (IoT) is still searching for a global standard and a global vision to bring out its full potential, and I believe critical communications will play a part in this global vision.

The banking sector is on the cusp of massive disruption, with crypto-currencies and blockchain technology set to slash the time and costs of transferring money, funding projects and doing business around the world. The public safety sector can teach and learn from this mission-critical sector as well.

Of course, 5G also requires massive amounts of spectrum, promises to deliver millisecond latency for automated services such as robotics, remote control, the tactile internet and self-driving vehicles. This new environment will undoubtedly have a profound effect on our lives and change the very definition of what it means to be human.

CC: When do you think such solutions might be widely deployed? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?

PC: I do not believe in immediate nationwide deployments of 4G or 5G technologies for critical communications. The processes that are currently underway in USA (FirstNet) and UK (ESMCP/ESN) are doomed to fail if the respective governments do not adjust their business models and rollout plans. New technologies must always be tested properly first before committing to wide-area deployments.

By their very nature, public safety networks are rightly conservative and risk-averse. We should let the private sector succeed or fail first and then learn from their mistakes when deploying similar technology adapted to public safety needs. This means that public safety LTE networks are unlikely to be deployed to the edge before 2025 or perhaps even later. This means that we will need to manage at least two separate mission-critical networks at different stages of development and maturity for a decade or more.

Critical networks need to cover the entire population and the vast majority of the landmass of the globe. Portable base stations and satellite solutions will need to work on a plug-and-play basis, integrating with terrestrial networks. Only governments and international cooperation can guarantee capacity, availability and relevant services when a disaster strikes in a remote location. We will need to totally rethink capacity and coverage issues in order to deliver advanced solutions to the edge.

I remain optimistic about the future as I believe that the younger generations will find a better way of organising the global society and economy over the coming decades. However, there are a large number of shorter-term risks as we transition from the old, hierarchical, natural resource-intensive way of producing goods and services to a newer, smarter, more agile, decentralised, resource-optimising way of delivering value and wellbeing to stabilising, increasingly homogeneous populations.

CC: Finally, what sort of initiatives is Quixoticity currently working on?

PC: Our focus at the moment is on two major initiatives that will develop during the course of 2016. I am in the early stages of setting up a Global Critical Alliance that will focus on bringing together some of the world’s major suppliers of next-generation critical communications equipment to provide the best possible vision, advice and solutions for mission-critical users around the globe.

Quixoticity is also developing a Global Index that will rank public safety authorities and providers according to a number of relevant criteria as we move from a 2G world towards a long-term future 5G vision. Those authorities that embrace smarter, sustainable, sensible, best-practice strategies will score higher in the Index; those authorities that fail to listen to user requirements, select inappropriate technologies and solutions, and waste valuable time and resources will score poorly. I believe that there is nothing like this anywhere in the market and it will be a valuable source of information for a wide range of actors in the global critical communications space.

Peter Clemons will speak at Comms Connect Wellington on Friday, 15 April. Make sure you get along if you can, to hear more of his insights into the future of the critical communications sector.