France
There will be a lot of
things possible with
video in the future if it’s
well implemented
a service from MNOs that will serve a
specied number of “communications
per square kilometres” with voice and
video services, with a stipulated level
of resilience, and this could be in
the form of a secure virtual network
(thanks to 5G network slicing), backed
up with service-level agreements
between the MoI and the provider(s).
e idea here is it would be up to the
provider to deliver the required service
and that this approach would avoid the
development of bespoke technologies
and allow the MoI to avoid having
to go into “the technical detail of the
radio interfaces”.
In terms of cost, Villebrun says
the MoI is seeking to achieve a price
per user that is “quite near” to a
commercial subscription, with some
additional costs for resiliency on top,
which would be minimised through
network sharing. “We would also like
to have very cheap terminals, so o
theshelf...”
She notes that the timetable for RRF
has yet to be decided and the team is
assessing the feasibility of widespread
deployment in 2022. However, one
objective is to have as much of a
mission-critical broadband service as
possible prior to the Olympics.
“I would like to see the opening
up of the indoor coverage market,”
Villebrun says. “We can’t pay for
dedicated in-building coverage for
public safety, we should share the costs
with e-health – ie, hospital at home,
surveillance to allow elderly people to
remain independent for longer, which
requires indoor coverage and public
coverage, small cells or whatever. We
need to build something in common
with those new markets and we hope
that those markets will push the inbuilding
coverage which we will be
able to reuse. More and more indoor
coverage is being added, in fact. We
hope that the regulations around 5G
will allow more in-building coverage.
ese are being discussed, but with 5G
we expect there will be opportunities.”
She adds that the feedback from
the PCSTORM project has been
positive and that the end-users are
“quite enthusiastic and waiting for the
tactical network service, and the re
brigades also want to join the system.
e concept of the tactical network,
replacing long-range proximity services
and long-range direct communication,
is under assessment – the remaining
issues are control room and video.
In the current contract, we have a
certain amount of video but it’s a little
bit better than best eort. We have
no warranty of service for massive/
mission-critical video.”
The art of push-to-video
management
Villebrun and her team see video
as the “next killer application”. She
highlights the many mission-critical
video functions that were introduced in
3GPP Release 14 and notes that if there
is a massive response to a huge attack or
a very large planned event and everyone
presses their push-to-video button,
with PCSTORM “we don’t have any
feedback about such circumstances and
will have to becareful”.
Similarly, there needs to be some
way in which the videos being
transmitted can be prioritised, as the
video service cannot be allowed to
consume all the network’s resources –
“We need to prepare operational sta
so they can make choices in case of
crisis, because at some point resources
will be limited.”
Villebrun is leading a TCCA Critical
Communications Broadband Group
(CCBG) taskforce to investigate the
practical considerations around the use
of mission-critical video (MCVideo).
She sees video analytics as the next
step to consider once control of
video streams and how this works
operationally has been determined and
well established, and she highlights the
potential for video analytics to be done
in a distributed manner, using “multiaccess
edge computing which is an
ETSI standard – there will be a lot of
things that will be possible with video
in the future if it’s well implemented”.
Villebrun highlights her concerns
around the cost of devices that use
Band 68, especially as the MoI would
like to provide volunteer reghters
(who have never been issued with
Tetrapol terminals) with a relevant
level of service, which necessitates very
cheap terminals, with bring your own
device (BYOD) being an option and
the cost of each subscription targeted at
around a few euros per month.
Clearly, a great deal of thought and
eort has been expended to get both
PCSTORM and RRF to their current
status. While the project is beneting
from the experiences of its peers (such
as the ESN and FirstNet projects in
the UK and US, respectively) and
made the wise move to embrace open
standards from its inception, it will be
interesting to see how it copes with the
hard deadline created by the Olympics
Games, as the degree to which ESN
has overrun has highlighted the
diculties in delivering such complex
and mission-critical projects.
The French MoI
is seeking to
have a robust
mission-critical
broadband service
in place prior to the
Olympic Games
and Paralympic
Games in2024
30 www.criticalcomms.com June 2019
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/www.criticalcomms.com