Jan 1, 2012 12:00 AM, By Donny Jackson (donald.jackson@penton.com)

When broadband communications finally come to the public-safety sector, many agencies will be forced to operate — and collaborate — in ways that will seem quite foreign at first. But ultimately it will help them navigate to an exciting new frontier.

For decades, public-safety agencies traditionally have owned their mission-critical communications systems, with many opting to hire trained staff to execute much of the repair and maintenance work on these networks. However, with dedicated public-safety LTE networks coming online, economic and technical realities are dictating different models for the implementation and ongoing operations of this new broadband wireless technology.

Ultimately, the business model used to deploy and maintain public-safety LTE networks will be influenced tremendously by national policymakers’ decisions regarding the rules, funding and governance of these dedicated 4G systems. As of press time, this direction remained the subject of consideration within Congress and likely will be debated by policymakers at the FCC for years to come.

Regardless of which business model ultimately is chosen, there is little doubt that LTE-based communications will provide a much different environment than the first-responder community has experienced in the LMR arena — and not just because 4G data speeds will dwarf anything that is capable on the fastest narrowband networks, which in turn will enable a host of advanced public-safety applications.

By all accounts, the hope is that dedicated LTE systems ideally would provide similar coverage and the same kind of reliability — perhaps even better — than mission-critical LMR networks do today. In addition, public safety would have priority to control network trafficking, including authentication and levels of bandwidth usage.

But political, technological and financial limitations dictate that the management of these all-IP systems will be vastly different from the traditional LMR model, where radio personnel employed by the public-safety agency directly identified and addressed issues related to network maintenance and upgrades.

“Ten years ago, if you had a site down, a service technician would go and troubleshoot it with his spectrum analyzer and service monitor and would fix it,” mobile wireless consultant Andrew Seybold said. “Today, the guy looks at the computer screen, calls a subcontractor and says, ‘Go to Site 157, pull card 4B and put a new one in,’ and that’s it — it’s done.

“And, by the way, the guy sitting in front of the computer may be 3,000 miles away from the cell site. So, it’s a totally different world.”

This scenario is just one example of the multilayered interdependence envisioned by many for the private, mission-critical LTE systems that will be designed to meet the needs of public safety, but also could be used by other government and mission-critical enterprises. Many envision that the operation of such systems will depend on leveraging a plethora of public and private partnerships, with third-party entities hosting much of the hardware and providing services for the systems.

The prospect of such flexibility has created considerable excitement throughout the industry, but the many changes and unknowns associated with broadband technology are expected to generate challenges that could prove to be daunting. Brian Kassa, head of convergence for Nokia Siemens Networks, compared the transition to westward expansion in the United States.

“We’re all sitting somewhere around the Mississippi River with our wagons, our teams, our families and all of our provisions,” Kassa said. “We’re headed for California, and we don’t know what it’s going to be when we get there.”

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© 2012 Penton Media, Inc.