Top 5 stories: Week of Jan. 5–9

Here’s a look at the most popular stories on IWCE’s Urgent Communications from last week:

1. “Are you prepared for LTE?” – In this e-zine, Bird Technologies representatives offer their analysis of indoor-coverage challenges and how those issues might be addressed when building the nationwide public-safety broadband network.

2. “Dramatic changes in LTE landscape bust myths, provide FirstNet with new options” – Remember when the prevailing view was that LTE would only be good for data? That carriers would never share their towers and other network infrastructure with their competitors? That those same carriers would want customers to use their networks exclusively? Well, the commercial wireless industry has changed – quickly and dramatically. IWCE’s Urgent Communications Editor Donny Jackson writes about some of those changes and what it all means for FirstNet.  

3. “Taller deployable towers could provide a ‘light at the end of the fiber’ for disaster response” – The radio systems manager for Polk County, Fla., Ben D. Holycross, makes the case for deployable towers that are taller than 500 feet. “As we all know, communications for first responders in a disaster or wide-area event are always problematic. In disaster-response situations such as Hurricane Katrina, where the entire local communications infrastructure is ‘laying on the ground,’ first responders are limited to either simplex operation or reduced-coverage solutions based on the capabilities they bring with them,” Holycross writes.

4. “Body-worn cameras by law enforcement raise myriad legal, policy questions” – Every day, there’s another report about a police department adopting a body-worn camera program in hopes of improving accountability and bolstering the public’s trust in law enforcement. While the cameras are widely seen as a benefit for both law enforcement and citizens, they also create plenty of new legal and policy issues that will need to be addressed. Should officers record video while on private property? How long should the videos be retained? At what point should the cameras be turned on and off? These are just some of the nagging questions that continue to linger even as the cameras proliferate.

5. “Motorola Solutions unit invests in VocalZoom for noise-cancellation technology that could be ‘game changer’” – Motorola Solutions announced last week that its venture-capital unit has invested in an Israel-based company that developed a microphone that uses an optical sensor to improve audio quality in cellular and radio products that operate in noisy environments. “So many of our customers—first responders, for example, and many of our commercial customers—work in these very noisy environments,” Reese Schroeder, managing director of Motorola Solutions Venture Capital said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “We believe this is really a potential game changer for those folks who work in those noisy environments, because this technology does an incredible job of filtering out a lot of the background noise, so you can understand what someone is saying.”