Interview: Jan Thompson, Ericsson

Ahead of his presentation on public safety at Comms Connect Sydney, we spoke with Jan Thompson, Global Head of Safety and Security for Ericsson, to get an idea of where the company is going with its offerings in the public safety and critical infrastructure protection sectors.

Jan Thompson joined Ericsson in 2011 to help develop the company’s public safety practice, becoming its head in June 2014.  Formerly he was CIO of the Scottish Police, where he led the organisation to deliver significant change… and in doing so won five Police Awards and became a UK eGovernment Awards finalist.

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Critical Comms: We’ve all seen that Ericsson is ‘getting back into’ public safety comms. What does this mean, and in fact did Ericsson really ever leave public safety?

Jan Thompson: Telecoms have been a vital part of public safety since the invention of the telegraph, and Ericsson has supported many public safety customers with their telecoms needs for nearly 140 years. So no, Ericsson has never really left public safety.

In more recent times (1990), Ericsson was marketing its EDACS mobile radio system to public safety. EDACS was one of the forerunners of technology such as TETRA and P25 and included many of the key features that these systems now support. Ericsson was involved in the development of TETRA and produced many of the TETRA system patents that are still in use today. At the time (mid-90s), Ericsson made the strategic decision to focus on the rapidly expanding cellular market and exited from further TETRA development. Even so, Ericsson has maintained a strong presence in public safety, supplying answering point systems, disaster emergency management and border area security systems with products such as Coordcom.

Information and communications technology plays an ever-increasing role in the capability of public safety, and Ericsson is at the forefront of these developments. Our service enablement platforms, distributed computing and high-capacity networking systems are finding applications in public safety ICT transformations, having started life in the telco world.

CC: Is there a particular niche Ericsson wants to focus on?

JT: Ericsson is one of the leading suppliers of LTE. With many operators deploying our LTE systems worldwide, we’ve found a strong demand for our capabilities, both in terms of technology and also the services to help them deploy mobile broadband for their users. Radio base stations and evolved packet core hardware and software are two of the more obvious items, and these are absolutely necessary. Yet so is our capability in coverage planning, spectrum management, radio site engineering, backhaul technologies and integration with existing telco networks to deliver a fully effective system.

CC: What specific technologies or architectures does Ericsson offer the marketplace at the moment?

JT: Our focus is in four areas:

• Mission-critical wireless systems incorporating technologies such as LTE but also TETRA and P25.
• Mission-critical fixed networks where we are able to deploy our extensive technology in microwave backhaul and networking technologies.
• Disaster emergency management, which includes public safety answering systems and civil alerting.
• Border area security where we are able to bring to together our integration skills to combine multiple sensor technologies into a system for blue and green border protection. This portfolio also includes critical infrastructure protection.

CC: What do you see as some of the challenges facing public safety comms around the world? Eg, spectrum availability for mobile broadband, interoperability?

JT: Mobile broadband has the potential to transform the way public safety solutions are delivered. To realise the benefits, we need the standards in place to realise the economies of scale that make it affordable. Spectrum is required to provide usable bandwidths to deliver these new services. Both will take time. At Ericsson we are developing our product portfolio for forwards compatibility as well as backwards compatibility to deliver the new features that the standards require.

The cost of building new networks is a major concern, and this is to a large part driven by issues around site acquisition. Network deployments with shared public and private networks are emerging and it is likely that this trend will increase as the standards are further ratified.

CC: What involvement does Ericsson have with forthcoming technologies such as 5G and others?

JT: 3GPP has been very influential in driving the public safety agenda as part of its standards-setting process. Public safety organisations have seen the rapid pace of technological development from 2G to 3G and 4G systems compared to their existing systems, and the dramatic falls in price that the economies of scale brought about through standardisation. They see the ability to transform their services and make their operators at the scene of an incident more empowered to make decisions and be better connected.

This does not mean the transformation will happen overnight. The standards process still has to complete its work and find its way into marketable products. The issues of allocating spectrum for public safety will proceed slowly as countries follow the WRC-15 spectrum recommendations.

TETRA and P25 are reliable and proven technologies and it is very likely we will see more mixed-mode systems with gateways between the two technologies. TETRA providing mission-critical voice with an LTE data overlay in more densely populated areas is a very likely strategy.

5G is coming and development is well underway. The higher capacity and low latency that 5G provides will enables new services such as remote control of search and rescue robots and real-time augmented reality for, say, firefighters entering a burning building.

CC: What will be the main thrust of your presentation at Comms Connect Sydney?

JT: We have deployed systems globally, and I hope I can share some of that experience with the audience — especially the lessons learned from deriving requirements from (what start out as) very high level problems or sets of concerns that a customer needs to address.

We’ve found that providing ‘line of sight’ from these concerns to the system solution not only focuses minds on the technical solution, but also on the business process changes that are required to realise the benefits our technology can bring. Ericsson has experienced this transformation with major telco operators and can bring this experience to public safety.

Jan Thompson, along with Ericsson colleague Bidar Homsey (Principal Consultant, Public Safety and Security), will present on the topic of ‘Public safety and critical infrastructure protection’ at Comms Connect Sydney, on Wednesday, 23 June from 11.30 am till noon.

Pictured: Jan Thompson, Global Head of Safety and Security, Ericsson.