Smartphones
Not everyone
needs a radio
Bob Escalle, vice-president – public safety & defence market segments at Sonim
Technologies, Inc, speaks to Sam Fenwick about his company’s recent work and
the use of smartphones to reduce the cost of two-way radio refresh cycles
16
www.criticalcomms.com September 2019
What is Sonim’s take on the transition from
mission-critical narrowband to broadband?
We don’t believe that there’s going to be a 100 per cent
replacement of LMR by mission-critical broadband for
public safety any time soon – it may take years and may never
happen. So we focus on the use of smartphones to augment
agencies’ use of LMR. There are agencies that don’t need to
provide two-way radios to all of their staff – some of them
may be just fine carrying a smartphone that has a push-to-talk
application running on it, and these and the two-way radio
users can communicate to each other through an IP gateway.
There are public safety agencies where departments have
transitioned some of their user groups off of LMR radios to
100 per cent on our Sonim devices, such as the animal control
folks, parks and recreation, code enforcement – those agency
personnel that don’t need to carry a very expensive P25 radio
but still can connect back into the primary communications
network through a gateway or through the PTT solution, and
may be perfectly fine carrying a Sonim XP8 device, not only
for PTT, but also for data connectivity and applications that
allow them to work much more efficiently.
Normally, when a public safety agency refreshes its handset
fleet, it replaces 100 per cent of its radios, but when you bring
smartphones into the equation, maybe 25 per cent of the
radio users are fine using smartphones instead, and as it costs
agencies $650-700 for a smartphone versus $3,000-7,000 for
a P25 radio; they can see huge cost savings. We’re seeing an
increase in the ratio of smartphones to two-way radios.
While Sonim has been around since 1999, it’s
still fairly new compared with some of the other
players in the market. What’s been your biggest
challenge in moving from those early beginnings
to where you are now?
It’s been a very large but very good learning curve. At first
the challenge was how to build ultra-rugged devices, then it
shifted to how could we provide them with more features and
greater robustness? Our latest generation of products, like the
XP5s, the XP3 and the XP8, are based on years of experience
and lessons learned. Each generation of smartphones is an
improvement thanks to customer feedback. As we provide
three-year warranties on our products, we have to build very
robust products that last a long time without a whole lot of
problems – if not we’d lose a lot of money in the process and
this has forced us to build better products.
The feedback we’ve received from the public safety market
led to us integrating side connectors to our devices for public
safety LMR-style accessories, like remote speaker microphones
that screw in and don’t come out. We also have an accessory
connector on the top of our devices for things like directmode
communications. Accessories play a key role in serving
our public safety customers – they expect good-quality audio
accessories, good-quality in-car mounting accessories, good
accessories for holsters and carrying apparatus and so forth;
we see the accessory side as one of our key differentiators.
Are there any tweaks you’ve made to make your
devices more intuitive and easier to use during
moments of intense stress?
We have worked with our application partners to make
the user interface much simpler. PTT applications can be
programmed to work in the background, so if you picked up
one of our smartphones that’s in sleep mode and it was an
urgent situation, you could hit the device’s PTT button and
you’d be able to communicate via the PTT app that’s running
on the device without having to unlock the phone or wake
it back up. That’s something that we’ve helped some of our
software partners work through.
Speaking of partners, we have well over 800 of them in
our partner portal and they range from hardware accessory
designers to software folks and computer-aided dispatch
application developers. Our partners serve a range of different
verticals and a lot of them are very unique in what they do
and some of the problems they’re trying solve with their
hardware or software. We open up our device to them as
a development tool by exposing APIs. This allows them to
Accessories play a key role in serving
our public safety customers – they
expect good-quality audio accessories and
so forth; we see the accessory side as
one of our key differentiators
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