Cross-border comms
No agency is an island
Emergencies and disasters know no boundaries. Public safety agencies need to have
communications in place across borders to quickly and effectively respond, minimising loss
of life and protecting property. Richard Martin hears from a number of those involved
Progress has been made in enabling public
safety and emergency agencies to work across
international borders in the Nordic countries, and
similar programmes are advancing in Northern
Europe. In the USA and Canada, the enormous
border includes dense urban areas, mountains, prairies and
forests. With Canada having selected Band 14 700MHz
for a future national public safety broadband network, the
potential for interworking with FirstNet in the USA during
emergencies has been laid.
Will the same story play out in Europe and other regions as
secure 4G/LTE moves forward? Let us consider some options
and examples for cross-border communications.
Just call me…
Mobile phones work across borders, and one way for
agencies to connect during emergencies is to share and store
numbers for when the need arises. Public mobile phones have
well-known drawbacks when used by public safety officers.
Generally they prefer their secure two-way radios to talk to
colleagues; projects to connect these are reviewed later. But
controllers, civil administrators and sometimes the officers
themselves may have to use a cell phone to call for crossborder
help or to pass on critical information.
One factor in favour of the use of public systems is that
organisations such as utilities, volunteers, local authority
staff, in fact anybody who may be needed to assist, can
be contacted if their names are available to the emergency
control centres. Another possibility is using commercial LTE
to provision cross-border emergency communications. This
could be made more secure with a separate protected core,
accessible from agencies on both sides. But in the future,
public safety 4G/LTE may be the ultimate solution for crossborder
communications.
Let’s review the work on the current cross-border secure
radio connections.
The story in Northern/Central Europe
European programmes include international talk groups.
These were identified and co-ordinated by the Public Safety
Sweden recently
hosted Barents
Rescue 2019,
which tested
operational
procedures,
together with the
readiness of users
and equipment
28 www.criticalcomms.com October 2019
/www.criticalcomms.com