Mar 1, 2011 12:00 AM, By Maria Palamara and Wim Brouwer

Long-Term Evolution technology will enable nationwide roaming, which is the key to widespread interoperability.

One vital lesson that has been learned from major crises — such as Hurricane Katrina and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — is that interoperable communications are of critical importance to first responders. When lives are in danger, police officers, firefighters and emergency medical teams must be able to communicate with each other clearly and immediately, or precious time and possibly lives will be lost.

In today’s land-mobile radio (LMR) networks, mobility and roaming between networks is very limited for a variety of reasons, including the lack of a common technology among the organizations assisting in the response, even when they are neighboring entities. In some areas, standardized Project 25 digital technology is used for LMR. However, these standards — developed specifically for public safety — have been slow to evolve. They were not designed to support easy roaming among first-responder networks, even though public-safety agencies often are mobilized from across a wide geographic area during emergencies. To maintain their communications capabilities, authorized first responders from other jurisdictions must be able to roam onto the network that is serving the incident area. They cannot rely on commercial networks to provide this service continuity, because these networks often become congested from the high volume of commercial traffic that results from the incident.

In contrast, automatic and secure roaming has been an integral part of commercial mobile networks from their initial introduction. Building broadband public-safety networks on commercial Long-Term Evolution, or LTE, technology will allow these same roaming capabilities to be leveraged for public-safety networks, enabling a faster and more cohesive response in cases of national emergency, such as when severe weather threatens millions of people — or whenever local, state and federal agencies need to work together more efficiently.

Widely embraced by public-safety organizations and identified by the Federal Communications Commission as the technology for the proposed nationwide broadband public-safety network, LTE wireless technology enables a giant step forward in interoperability. Based on Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards, this all-IP technology supports an open-device ecosystem and allows easier communication across disciplines and jurisdictions, capabilities that are taken for granted in commercial wireless networks. And with LTE’s inherent support for roaming, first responders can gain access to essential services over any LTE network — including commercial networks. 

Public safety also can expect to leverage a broad choice of devices, equipment, and applications that are enabled by the wide-scale deployment of LTE and other commercial standardized broadband technologies. 

In other words, public-safety personnel will be able to roam into other jurisdictions and communicate instantly and easily using LTE devices. So, no matter where they must go, first responders will be able to use familiar devices, connect to other agencies — and still be linked to their home networks. These capabilities make LTE the best technology to truly support nationwide interoperability for public safety, and the most promising for delivering next-generation, multimedia, mission-critical applications.

Other benefits of LTE to first responders include:

• A wider selection of high-performance capabilities produced by billion-dollar investments in commercial R&D.
• Greater competition among developers and vendors that sparks new innovations — and lower costs.
• A broad and diverse selection of user devices.
• Forward- and backward-compatibility with widely used 3G and 4G technologies employed by large commercial service providers.

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