Winds of change

Note to the public-safety community: Like it or not, commercial technology is coming to a jurisdiction near you. After years of shying away from targeting the public-safety community because of a lack of economies of scale and lengthy sales cycles, commercial wireless vendors are moving into the first responder market because they can now tailor off-the-shelf products to public-safety needs.

A primary driver for this trend is the FCC’s allocation of spectrum for public safety that closely aligns with that of the commercial world, primarily the 4.9 GHz and 700 MHz bands. Another major catalyst is the emergence of packet-based networks based on CDMA2000 or wideband-CDMA (W-CDMA) capable of delivering high-speed data and real-time voice services, like push-to-talk (P2T). High-speed data services are becoming more crucial to public-safety agencies because they give first responders access to critical information from remote locations. And finally, there generally is a greater emphasis on emergency communications today in light of the many interoperability failures first responders have faced during major disasters.

“Public safety is coming more into focus lately,” said Mark Koro, senior director of government affairs with wireless technology company Qualcomm. “This community is turning to commercial systems because they see a capability they can buy at RadioShack that they don’t have in their toolkit right now.”

Qualcomm, whose roots can be traced to its development of spread spectrum CDMA technology for the military, has been assisting the federal government for the past 21 years with initiatives such as the Department of Defense’s secure cell phone project. But it acknowledges that the first responder community is becoming a sharper focus for the company. Despite selling its CDMA network infrastructure business to Ericsson in the late 1990s, Qualcomm kept some of its technology to enable it to build a small deployable CDMA 1xRTT system known as the Qualcomm Deployable Base Station, which has been in use for a year.

Following Hurricane Katrina, the base station was deployed via helicopter to St. Barnard Parish to provide wireless communication services. The solution creates a private mobile system that can bridge to public or land mobile radio (LMR) systems and utilize existing phones.

Arguably, the advent of the 4.9 GHz band resulted in a seismic shift in public-safety officials’ thinking about leveraging commercial technology. First responders successfully lobbied the FCC in 2004 to relax the emission mask of the band so public safety could take advantage of the economies of scale created by Wi-Fi commercial deployments. That resulted in a plethora of mesh Wi-Fi players announcing products in the 4.9 GHz band. Municipalities nationwide also are anxious to deploy cheap broadband using Wi-Fi technologies, and many governments seeking municipal Wi-Fi systems are requesting solutions that include both 2.4 GHz for public access and 4.9 GHz for critical public-safety applications.

“Public-safety agencies are now able to leverage commercial solutions and not the proprietary networks that don’t have interoperability across different solutions,” said Brian Jenkins, vice president of product management for SkyPilot, a provider of Wi-Fi mesh networks. “Now they have a way to follow on the coattails of commercial networks to build out public-safety hot zones.”

The same phenomenon likely will be repeated in the 700 MHz band. Earlier this year, President George W. Bush signed budget-reconciliation legislation that included a firm date for TV broadcasters to finally vacate the 700 MHz band — a chunk of which will be reallocated to first responders — and $1.2 billion in funding earmarked for public-safety communications.

Since the spectrum was earmarked for first responders before high-speed data services existed, the 700 MHz band only supports voice channels at this point. In light of this, the public-safety community recently asked the FCC to modify its rules to allow for additional broadband data in the 700 MHz band and to let public safety choose how to divide the band, rather than being limited to a rigid 12 MHz voice/12 MHz broadband data split. The FCC has issued a notice of proposed rulemaking on the topic.

The National Public Safety Telecommunications Council’s spectrum management committee has proposed to the FCC that the commission reallocate public safety’s resources on a regional basis by allowing 1.25 MHz operations with a larger guard band (First Responder Communications, April, page 2). This would let public safety leverage commercial technologies such as CDMA 1x EV-DO — which is designed to deliver wireless broadband data services within 1.25 MHz of spectrum. It’s a move Qualcomm, the inventor of mobile CDMA systems, covets. Qualcomm’s Coral said the company would be making a filing with the FCC in support of that request.

“With the commercial world getting 30 megahertz in the band and public safety getting 24, there will be tremendous economies of scale for public safety,” Koro said. “Handset providers can make devices for the commercial world, and the same device could be used in public-safety spectrum as a dedicated device.”

The next generation of 1x EV-DO, known as EV-DO Rev. A, will support real-time P2T services with quality-of-service assurances and latency below 100 ms. The potential entrance of EV-DO into the public-safety 700 MHz spectrum arena plays into the hands of mobile vendors like China-based ZTE, which recently debuted in the U.S. market. One of its flagship products is the Global Open Trunking Architecture, or GoTa, that ZTE bills as a “new generation” digital trunking system using CDMA, which is for public mobile radio/public access mobile radio applications.

The GoTa system has been put into commercial or pilot use in 22 systems worldwide, some of them for dedicated public-safety use in countries such as Brazil, China, Malaysia and Norway.

Nortel Networks licenses the solution on an OEM basis, and Qualcomm also is a proponent of the IP-based P2T system. The latter already offers its Q Chat product — many speculate Sprint Nextel will use the technology when it upgrades to EV-DO Rev. A — which enables higher data speeds compared with EV-DO and real-time voice services like P2T. But the market likely will see Qualcomm integrate some of ZTE’s P2T elements into its Q Chat solution. While the current version of GoTa supports CDMA 1x technology, ZTE’s research and development team is working on support for EV-DO Rev. A.

“It wasn’t developed for public safety since push-to-talk is an add-on capability, but the performance is good enough to be primarily used as a public-safety system,” said Lance Cornish, senior director of wireless development for ZTE USA.

However, a more typical deployment scenario would involve a GoTa system running in conjunction with a commercial network. The system has its own dedicated packet core that operates like a public network with significant added P2T functionality, such as service priority, group calling, private calling and dynamic regrouping. Cornish said performance concerning connect times and media latency is high because ZTE has constructed the system to leverage the signal set within the CDMA2000 network, which includes some of the typical P2T capabilities such as channel sharing.

The system comes with handsets also developed by ZTE, which include ruggedized devices designed specifically for the first responder market. For instance, a device could include an emergency button that gives a call the highest priority in the P2T system. ZTE also is building into GoTa more redundancy, which will be available later this year, and is merging location-based technologies into its handsets.

Cornish said ZTE would trial the system with some unnamed commercial operators in the U.S. later this year. He noted that while GoTa provides an evolution path for users, the current installed base in the U.S. makes that proposition “less clear.” Nevertheless, he envisions the potential for commercial providers to deploy the solution alongside their existing CDMA networks and provide adjunct services to the public-safety community, much like Sprint Nextel has done using iDEN.

ZTE has presented GoTa, in conjunction with Qualcomm, for inclusion in Project MESA (Mobility for Emergency and Safety Applications), the collaborative effort between the U.S. standards-making body Telecommunications Industry Association and the European Telecommunication Standards Institute to identify and create common specifications for a next-gen public-safety network (First Responder Communications, April, page 12). Project MESA finally received the vendor support it has been seeking during the last four years, as commercial manufacturers submitted five new proposals during a working group meeting held in Boston in April (MRT, June, page 8).

EADS, Harris, Motorola, Qualcomm — with partner ZTE — and Thales all submitted proposals to meet Project MESA’s statement of requirements developed in 2002 that includes the goal of creating a “systems of systems” approach that will match and exceed the capabilities of today’s 3G commercial systems in a technology-neutral way. The proposals all leverage commercial technology and include CDMA 1x EV-DO, W-CDMA, variations of 802.11 and WiMAX and satellite technologies.

Charles Werner, chief of the Charlottesville (Va.) Fire Department and a member of the SAFECOM Executive committee, called the proposals a major paradigm shift. “This demonstrates that the barriers of public versus private systems has been broken, allowing the public-safety community to choose the technology platform that best meets its needs.”

Project MESA members expect more proposals prior to the organization’s next meeting in October in Nice, France. With a significant number of proposals in hand, TIA and ETSI can then begin the standardization process and whittle down or combine the proposals where it makes sense to receive a consensus, said Craig Jorgensen, chair of Project MESA’s service specification group.

Meanwhile, the public-safety sector has attracted some unusual would-be partners. In April, Cyren Call Communications, led by Nextel co-founder Morgan O’Brien, filed a proposal with the FCC to reallocate 30 MHz of 700 MHz spectrum that would be licensed to a public-safety trust. The trust would lease the valuable airwaves to commercial operators, which would build interoperable, public-safety-grade broadband networks (MRT, June, page 52).

Public-safety entities would have priority on the systems — augmented by satellite for redundancy and coverage purposes — but the operators could garner additional revenues by selling services utilizing the anticipated considerable excess network capacity. Leveraging the commercial sector is key because it brings economies of scale to the public-safety sector, and because taxpayer-funded proposals would not be supported politically, O’Brien said.

In addition, M2Z Networks, co-founded by former FCC Wireless Bureau Chief John Muleta, has applied to operate a national wireless broadband network in the 2155 MHz to 2175 MHz band. The band is adjacent to a chunk of advanced wireless services spectrum, which is expected to generate billions of dollars for the U.S. Treasury during an auction scheduled to begin this month. M2Z wants to provide high-speed data service to at least 95% of the U.S. population within the next decade using an IP-based fixed wireless network based on WiMAX technology. M2Z also intends to provide first responders with high-speed data services with the help of mesh vendor PacketHop, which would deliver additional security-oriented applications.

The public-safety community remains skeptical of these initiatives, but is studying the details. While the Cyren Call and M2Z proposals ultimately may be thwarted by lack of FCC interest, they demonstrate the speed at which commercial technology is moving into the public-safety sector. Although first responders want the economies of scale associated with commercial technologies, they also fear that features crucial to saving lives might be lost.

“It would help if public safety understood what commercial providers have available and what the potential is,” said Wanda McCarley, president of the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials. “It’s also important for commercial providers to understand public-safety needs and the apprehension we have about technologies.”

One of McCarley’s goals is to ask APCO’s executive council to develop a committee that will begin studying how public safety can adopt commercial technology (see story on page 10). One aim would be to get commercial vendors to sit down at the table with the first responder community.

“There’s so much available, and we can’t be on the bleeding edge of technology because people’s lives hang on the brink. The bleeding edge is intimidating. The cutting edge is where we want to be,” McCarley said.

Indeed, the 700 MHz band may be just where public safety can get its feet wet by incorporating commercial technology to operate high-speed data services that complement existing public-safety networks.

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