Interview
connectivity of devices, thereby enabling the industrial
Internet of Things. That’s important for our users, because it’s
a necessary condition to enable smart cities and the real-time
information that can guide their operations.
CCT: Could you boil down the current business
cases for 5G in a mission-critical context?
PS: Focusing on increased capacity first of all, we currently
see it as essentially enabling the movement of a lot more
real-time video and telemetry. That’s the information which
provides immediate situational awareness for first-responders
and in turn will end up feeding artificial intelligence within
emergency services command centres. Over time, we’ll be able
to bring the command centre to be more and more virtually
‘there’ at the incident.
The low latency aspect of 5G may take a little longer before
it matters to public safety, but it will obviously become more
relevant as organisations start to introduce robotics use-cases,
and use it to control drones. Motorola Solutions has no plans
to build drones, but weaving video from them into the fabric
of incident management is something we are doing.
That’s step number one when it comes to UAVs
(unmanned aerial vehicles). Step number two is making them
autonomous, thereby taking pilots out of the equation. An
example of how that could be useful would be having the
drones embark on a search pattern, or instruct them to fly to a
particular point on a map so they become the first-responder
on the scene.
CCT: What advantages will 5G ‘network slicing’
provide for those working in public safety?
PS: Network slicing is essentially the ability to create
‘virtual’ networks on top of a pre-existing (shared) physical
infrastructure operated by a carrier. In that situation, the user
is able to set parameters around the network in real time,
including QoS quality of service, capacity, and even coverage.
I think of this as the networking component to what cloud has
already done for computing and storage – allowing a user to
dynamically ‘spin up’ computing, storage and the networking
to match a given need.
With that in mind, I don’t think network slicing really
has a large immediate impact to public safety. Operators
Paul Steinberg CV
Paul Steinberg, senior vice-president of technology, leads Motorola Solutions’
technology and intellectual property strategy as well as the company’s strategic venture
capital investment group. Steinberg joined Motorola in 1992 as a senior software
development engineer in the wireless infrastructure group and has also served as the
company’s CTO and its network infrastructure unit’s chief architect for carrier wireless
infrastructure broadband products (3G and LTE). Before joining Motorola, Steinberg was
a distinguished member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
He is a member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Technical
Advisory Council (TAC) and served on the FCC’s Technical Advisory Board for First
Responder Interoperability. He is also a member of the Illinois State Governor’s Smarter
Illinois Advisory Board and the Illinois Technology Association’s IoT council. Steinberg is
a member of the board of trustees for Adler Planetarium in Chicago.
He has an associate’s degree of applied science in electrical engineering from
Parkland College and a degree in computer science from Illinois Benedictine College.
today already create virtual private network services with
differentiated QoS for public safety (eg, FirstNet/AT&T
in the US and ESN/EE in the UK). Over time, as the slice
management interfaces mature along with the associated
business model, we might see network ‘slices’ put into place
that serve particular services (such as a smart city sensor
network) or that are created dynamically to add dedicated and
tailored capacity around an incident scene or event.
The grade of service part – for instance, the ability to
request priority and pre-emption – is also there right now. A
lot of the 3GPP-defined mission-critical services (group PTT,
video and data) are built on the standardised interfaces which
essentially allow an application to request differentiated service.
Coming back to current use-cases involving 5G, you
can certainly see lower latency becoming vital in particular
situations. For example, a bomb disposal technician could
use it to operate a robot via a localised network slice. In
this circumstance the response needs to be as precise and
immediate as it would if the bomb disposal technician’s hands
were actually there.
CCT: What do you anticipate will be the take-up of
5G from the user community?
PS: A lot of our customers worldwide ask if they should
wait for 5G, and my answer is no, as one can already realise a
number of mission-critical services over 4G, after all – you can
do push-to-talk, group video, move telemetry and data, and
you can connect devices.
The migration and adoption of 5G is an evolutionary
process, with 3GPP – as it always does so well – enabling a
graceful path forward. Ultimately, you will see 5G supported
in user devices, in parallel with the roll-out of a cost-effective
ecosystem. As that happens, public safety can ride the
wave – all it needs to do is work that new capability into its
use-cases incrementally.
We will be in a heterogeneous world for some time to
come since 5G won’t have huge capacity impacts for the rural,
coverage-limited areas where the high-end spectrum simply
doesn’t provide cost-effective propagation. So even in a world
of 5G where it is deployed in the high-capacity, dense areas
(ie, urban, campus, etc) we will still be working with 4G-like
services over large parts of the geography.
September 2019 @CritCommsToday 23