Ericsson's evolution in public safety and security

Global comms giant is making public safety and security a priority for its business.

Communications firm Ericsson is a giant of the field, with a long business pedigree and exposure in numerous sectors all around the world. Critical Comms had the opportunity to sit down and speak with Jan Thompson, Ericsson’s global head of public safety and security — responsible for managing the global team and for driving the growth in the business — on the sidelines of Comms Connect Melbourne 2015, to find out more about the company and where its business is heading.

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CC: You have an interesting technology background. Can you tell us a little about it?

JT: I joined Ericsson about four years ago from the Scottish Police, where I was the CIO. At that time there were eight police forces in Scotland, about 23,000 users, I had about 420 staff, an installed base of about £100 million and a £65 million annual budget, much of which was staff costs. I was responsible for the operational support of all those eight police forces, whether it was TETRA or mobile radio, databases, footprint databases — I even had to sign a requisition for an anti-aircraft missile detection system for a commercial airport once. It was such a wide remit — it really was the whole operational remit of information and communications technology and telecoms.

I was also responsible for the program of development as well, and that included initiatives to try and pull the eight forces together in order to share information and work collaboratively. That’s everything from information management through to common command and control systems. And then also part of my remit was the liaison and dealing with government. At St Andrew’s House in Edinburgh I would go and persuade these guys to hand over the cash so we could build this program of work in order to support the operational police needs. And that experience is why Ericsson contacted me — by bringing that experience into my global role, I can bring that knowledge and background and understand the challenges that our customers face.

CC: Where is Ericsson heading with its business?

JT: Ericsson has recently reorganised in order to prioritise public safety and security amongst other industry and society areas. But we have been in this business for 30 years. For instance, we installed the emergency 112 national solution into Stockholm. It’s a fantastic installation, 30 metres down under the ground. It was initially built as an atom bomb-proof shelter. It’s pretty impressive just to go and look at it. That’s one of the earlier things we did in public safety and security.

We’re going through a transition in the area of public safety and security. Ericsson is traditionally quite a product-focused mobile network business. Some of the things I’ll mention there, like command and control systems, they’re quite application centric, and actually the software and the services and the solutions we provide no longer can follow the product conversation — it needs to be much more about what the customers’ challenges are, [for instance] how fast you respond to an incident, whether it’s a fire, or a crime or a medical incident, or flooding or any number of things.

In terms of how we define our portfolio, [an example is] border and area security solutions, so the monitoring of coastal and land borders to enable free movement of individuals. For example, if you need to monitor a border area or a coastal area as a nation, to protect that nation and facilitate the free movement of people, then you’ll need video surveillance capabilities, buried cable sensors, fence-mounted sensors — and all of that needs to be connected back through, say, a fibre-optic network or a microwave network into a central command and control solution.

CC: Can you give us a real-world example where your solutions are making a difference?

JT: I give an example of the installation we have at São José dos Campos, which is an hour’s drive from São Paulo in Brazil. This is a city of about 600,000 people who have, along with many other Brazilian cities, a problem with crime and violent crime. The electorate chose the mayor on the promise that [he would] reduce crime. Our dialogue with the mayor and his team was to work out how to use ICT and telecoms in order to provide an operational change that would reduce crime.

When I first went there in 2011, [in one room] there were two banks of about 20 or 30 people who were watching camera feeds and making phone calls to local police stations when they saw something. So that was the level of sophistication… ring up the nearest police station and send somebody out to have a look.

The number of people sitting in that room — if only we could find a way to free them up and get them out on the street, then they would be starting to address the crime problems. So that was one of the things we needed to solve; how do we do that?

And what we did was we installed a command and control system which was very sophisticated and had geographical information to show where the nearest police car was to an incident. By installing this solution, we had taken probably 20 people out of that room and put them into operational policing.

CC: Does an extra 20 officers on the street really make a big difference?

JT: From my experience, policing and public safety organisations are like any other business — they have to be effective and efficient, and they have to get the most out of the budget. If you’ve got 20 or 30 people sitting in a room watching cameras… you can hear the efficiency message coming out. [Research has shown that] for a country of 10 million people, if you can respond a minute quicker, you can save something like 70 million euros per year.

In quite hardnosed business terms, we can do this stuff cheaper [and] respond better, and all the countries that are under pressure from recessions, as the UK has been recently, are actually able to get more value out of their resources.

CC: Speaking of the UK, what do you think of its plans to move to public safety via commercial carriers?

JT: TETRA is going to be here, and PMR is going to be here, for a long time. They’re still deploying it in Germany and in the Middle East. I think in the UK, that asset will be with us for some time, and who knows how long that will be. I think the UK government would like a nice, simple ‘switch off the TETRA and switch on the LTE’, but I think experience shows us that it has taken so long to get TETRA into the culture of policing that they really won’t want to let it go so easily. Apart from the technological side of things, the actual culture of how to work around these systems [means] I think TETRA is going to be here for a while in the UK.

CC: What about the challenge of mixing old and new systems?

JT: It’s tempting at these conferences to talk about what’s being deployed now and what the future is. But actually the legacy systems, the telephony systems, the databases… how to integrate that all together is a huge challenge… how to bring all that content together under one solution.

What we need is a professional, consistent, repeatable approach to bringing all these different systems in together, and so [at Ericsson] we follow a model which is based around how video and microwave and fibre all fit within an overall structure of technology and content and devices, and how you bring those in. So that you can then interchange different types of products and solutions in an overall framework.

Organisations such as Ericsson will need to create the structure by which those solutions are provided. We are developing our industry and society space; we are continuing to develop that framework into which we can bring in different elements of a solution. So this is all geared up to providing solutions to meet our customers’ needs — protection of the vulnerable, and getting people out of the way of harm. We’re less considering the specific items of technology; we’re more considering the structure of how that all fits together, and Ericsson is shifting from an organisation that provides a product and installs it to an organisation that orchestrates different elements of the solution and provides professional services in order to integrate all those solutions together.

CC: That sounds like managed services?

JT: Ericsson has a very strong base of managed services that we provide around the world, with major global network operations centres. And that capability is equally applicable to public safety and security organisations. The explosion of technology means that there is much more for police and fire and ambulance services to be responsible for, and at some point they just need to let things go [and hand them off to] organisations that are specifically designed to manage those services. This is absolutely a space [for which] Ericsson has evolved.

To put it in perspective, Ericsson last year reached its 1 billionth subscriber in managed services. That makes us the largest communications managed services business globally by miles. That’s across commercial operator networks, but it also includes public safety — we have a lot of public safety cases where we do managed services for the network too.

CC: What role do you play in the Australian communications landscape?

JT: [We deal with] the three major tier 1 operators in Australia. Telstra is one of our largest customers. In public safety, we work with the Tasmanian Government for the TMRN, have done for quite a long time, and run a managed service for that business down there. We have a relationship with a lot of the other product suppliers, such as Motorola, for public safety. We have a lot of business in Australia at the moment, and we deal with a lot of safety organisations.

CC: What do you see coming next on the communications horizon?

JT: We’re going to see the evolution of command and control centres. They haven’t really changed greatly for 30 years. You know, people ring up and say ‘there’s a problem’. We going to see much more visual information being communicated, and the analytics of that information. And there’ll be different channels through which people will communicate. People are walking around with cameras on their phones, so we’ll start to see them being asked by police for permission to take the streamed input into the command and control centre to help manage the situation.

Of course we’ll see the evolution of the mobile networks and the development and saturation of the networks, and the accessibility that that provides. And then we’ll see remote control and 5G technology starting to creep in. We’ll see massive increase in mobile data traffic. And of course the Internet of Things.

All of these changes are going to present us with things we can’t possibly imagine, [including the] sheer volume of information. So my view is that how that information is handled is going to be one of the future evolutions of the world we call information and communications technology and telecoms.

Pictured: Jan Thompson, Ericsson