OPINION: Narrowband, not narrow-minded

Land mobile radio has set the pace through innovation and delivering more with less, while simultaneously providing operational flexibility and resilience for users. Trunking and specialised mobile radio (SMR) techniques are the pioneering solutions that radio users have demanded and employed for their critical and enterprise operations. Digital radio delivers reliable one-to-many voice communications more effectively and efficiently than any other networked wireless solution. Instant group-based communications remains essential for mobile teams.

However, without network resource sharing and collaboration, smart SMRs and GRNs - first established in Australia - would not have been as successful, nor would they have been adopted globally. Without question, it has been the vision and determination to harness LMR technologies and apply them specifically to the needs of government and enterprise users alike that has built and sustained a client-focused industry that directly and indirectly employs over 3000 professionals in Australia.

Yet it is not good enough to live on past successes and become so core-focused that we miss influencing and changing the future. In particular, the LMR industry cannot provide lip service to the data needs of users - rather, it must engage proactively in the harnessing of data applications to serve its clients.

No longer can we rely just on ‘instant voice’ and ‘hardened networks’ as the means to convince new users of the benefits of investing into LMR. We must realise that ‘data is the new voice’.

Holy Grails like great audio, long battery life and excellent RF design meant nothing when a certain computer company connected an audio player and full colour interactive display to a phone module. That day the world changed forever - no one cared about great audio, RF performance and battery life, but instead wanted and desired a new concept - a smartphone with apps.

The lesson for our industry is that we must harness the best concepts and delivery technologies that will open up the capabilities of our narrowband networks and investments. Narrowband does not mean narrow-minded.

Perhaps our greatest collaboration partner for the future is cloud computing. What is a cloud? Effectively it is a DataSMR. This we know and understand, we invented it, a sharing of purpose-built, hardened technology platforms, with flexibility, security, scalability and pay-as-you-go. Sounds like a GRN or SMR, but with data, not voice.

Our industry must engage and embrace cloud computing or DataSMR techniques. They share a single customer base focus like ours, ie, traditional LMR users such as enterprises, government and field operational teams.

Embracing cloud-computing concepts translates to delivering focused enterprise applications from a hardened and universal accessible resource. Access via the internet can be via many communication paths, including narrowband.

What LMR offers is a low-cost, resilient, always-available and value-added proposition for our users. But we can no longer refine our hardware story and live on voice applications alone - instead we must focus our energy not on our core business, but on our customers’ core businesses. That means understanding how and why they run their operations so that as LMR professionals, we can partner, collaborate and bring a new suite of client solutions that blend SMR and DataSMR together.

To sustain our industry, we must look up, refocus from our protocol wars and take our seat at the communications table with other delivery systems such as 3/4G and LTE. That way, we can provide our customers with smarter, more efficient and client-focused solutions that include data applications. Data is the new voice.

*David Cox is co-founder and Director of Pacific Wireless Communications and also VP Distribution for Safemobile Pty Ltd. He is the recipient of this year's ARCIA Jonathan Livingston Award.