Next generation
URLLC is expected to enable
mission-critical applications that are
sensitive to peak latency. There is a
lot of excitement about what those
capabilities will mean for public safety
users, and Clemons believes these
will be vital in “opening up futuristic
scenarios such as autonomous vehicles,
autonomous drones and remote
surgery”. This chimes with Rehbehn’s
view that one of the most promising
potential applications of URLLC
is in using augmented reality to aid
firefighters. He explains this would
work by taking information from
sensors and video, then fusing it to
present an augmented field of view
inside a firefighter’s mask. That could
include information such as outlines of
walls, a path to exit, and an indication
of the building’s occupancy. This would
be an enhanced version of Qwake
Technologies’ C-THRU. He cautions
such use-cases are unlikely to reach
large-scale adoption; this is just an
example, if you think about “the art of
the possible” with no budget limits.
William Webb, author of The 5G
Myth: And why consistent connectivity
is a better future, believes URLLC is
a “confusing” term given that “low
latency and ultra-reliability don’t
necessarily go together”. This is because
there is far more to reliability than the
capabilities granted by URLLC – it
won’t remove the need for network
sites to be engineered to have no
single point of failure, to be hardened
against power failure and have multiple
backhaul paths. After all, what good is
the ability to guarantee the delivery of
a data packet under normal operating
conditions when your whole network
has gone dark?
This disconnection is important
when discussing the role of 5G
networks in critical communications as
reliability is foundational to resilience,
whereas “low latency may not offer
anything for the emergency services”.
Bumps on the road
The blocker in the near term isn’t down
to capabilities at all. “The main issue is
the lack of coverage,” says Webb. “It
will be a long time before public safety
can rely on 5G being everywhere.”
To put that into context, the UK’s
first 4G service went live in a handful
of cities in October 2012. Under
government proposals released last
month, geographic 4G coverage will
not reach 95 per cent until 2025.
To date, each generation of mobile
broadband has developed more quickly
than its predecessor, but the gap
between a service going live in one area
and reaching an acceptable level of
geographic coverage will remain a yearslong
process, and as a consequence
public safety agencies won’t be able to
build their strategy around a reliance on
5G New Radio in the medium term.
That’s why policies and contracts need
to look to 5G but pay closer attention
to the standards that are available today.
IHS Markit’s Rehbehn, in his Ready for
Duty? whitepaper, points out that with
LTE capabilities continuing to mature
in tandem with 5G development,
what is important is that emergency
services agencies “incorporate flexible
language” so they are free to make use
of 5G “if, and when, the technology
becomes part of a network operator’s
offering”. Here we come back to the
question of coverage, as “the economic
basis for network operators to support
these bands in lower-density population
areas is weak”, so agencies “will not have
universal access to high-capacity 5G,
and operational plans should not assume
the capability is available”. Rehbehn
says “very high-performance 5G will
be constrained in geographic coverage,
surrounded by a sea of LTE that is
operating at varying levels of capability”.
A decade of progress
5G networking will unlock new
possibilities for how the emergency
services manage critical situations.
Yet in the near term the broader
transition from existing radio systems
to mobile broadband is the bigger
challenge. The shift to LTE will be a
more transformative leap, and it can
be tackled in a way that will simplify
a future move to 5G. Public safety
agencies should also note there are
limits to 5G. Here ETSI’s Scrase
calls for a balanced view. He revisits
the 5G triangle, stating that “you
cannot have very high broadband,
very high reliability, and very low
latency” at the same time. To achieve
that would require “very extreme
network performance”. He clarifies that
eventually public safety organisations
will need to weigh up which aspect
will deliver the greatest step-change in
offering a better solution to managing
a situation, and ensure that provision
– whether around reliability, latency
or bandwidth – is included in contract
negotiations with the service provider.
Clemons emphasises the need for
a realistic outlook, but we can still be
optimistic about a safer future on the
horizon. He says “the development,
installation and operation of radically
new solutions is fraught with danger
in the short term, so it is probably
wise for governments and public safety
agencies to keep a close eye on early
5G roll-outs. Mistakes will happen,
networks will fail, services will fail and
bad things will happen in the early
years of 5G. But the long-term promise
of 5G, and the hundreds and thousands
of highly skilled and committed people
and organisations working to make it
happen, make me confident that within
a decade, by 2030, it should be possible
for us to lay the foundations of a better,
smarter, safer world.”
The 5G triangle
shows its three
main aspects:
enhanced mobile
broadband
(eMBB),
ultra-reliable
low-latency
communication
(URLLC)
and massive
machine type
communications
(mMTC – also
known as massive
IoT), together with
their associated
use-cases
November 2019 @CritCommsToday 19
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