On the
cusp
Philip Mason and Sam Fenwick
cover the key talking points from the
BAPCO/Critical Communications
Europe event, which addressed a
range of topics around public safety
and the migration to broadband
As might be expected, much of the emphasis
in the BAPCO part of the Coventry 2019
conference programme was on the rollout
of burgeoning – and in some cases,
even currently operational – national LTE
networks for public safety. One crucial difference this year,
however, was a noticeable shift in the tone of the discourse,
particularly on the American side, away from ‘will it work?’
to ‘what benefits will the systems bring in the long term?’.
This included a fair chunk of material looking at, still fairly
amorphous, concepts such as the ‘connected first-responder’,
whose life, it’s anticipated, will become considerably easier
thanks to the availability of markedly increased bandwidth,
low latency, along with how the widespread leveraging
of public safety LTE could hasten closer ties with
manufacturers, and even crossover between the development
of commercial and public safety equipment.
Rather than the traditional Emergency Services Network
(ESN) update – although we did get one of those, at the
start of day two – this year’s programme kicked off with half
an hour from the acting CEO of FirstNet, Ed Parkinson. In
his keynote address, he discussed ‘Global co-operation and
co-ordination for public safety wireless programmes’, taking
in several of the themes mentioned above.
Parkinson began his presentation by giving an overview
of the current adoption of FirstNet across the US, with
the network having been up and running for around nine
months – albeit minus the Holy Grail of mission-critical
push-to-talk (MCPTT) functionality. This includes more
than 425,000 public safety users working for more than
5,250 agencies, who signed up having been compelled by
nothing more than the “leveraging of market forces”.
“We see in the US how public safety broadband is being
used every single day, by every public safety user. Some of
that is commercial grade and some of it is FirstNet, but
that’s the direction in which the market is going, and it’s
going to be irreversible.” For more on this, see our interview
with Parkinson on page 18.
From ‘ES When’ to ESN
Having witnessed Parkinson’s FirstNet presentation on day
one, it would be fair to say that a good way to describe it was
‘quietly exuberant’. The start of day two also witnessed its
26 www.criticalcomms.com April 2019
/www.criticalcomms.com