By Timothy Downs, Conference Director

I am very excited about the future of public-safety communications—particularly how LTE mobile broadband technology will not only solve interoperability and economies of scale limitations, but also offer new and advanced capabilities, which will truly impact people’s lives.

The public-safety community is in a period of great transition. Over the next 20 years, technology advancements will increase accessibility of data/video applications to public safety and allow for the eventual migration of voice communications from disparate Land Mobile Radio (LMR) networks to a nationwide Long Term Evolution (LTE) broadband network.

Having been in the mobile industry—first as next-generation WiMAX appeared and then as LTE emerged as the global favorite for 3G and 4G networks—the prospect of observing the same innovation creep into the public-safety and critical communications industries is as exciting as it is transformational.

LTE mobile broadband-enabled applications will bring greatly enhanced capabilities for first responders, such as real-time video streaming, predictive analytics, real-time monitoring, unparalleled situational awareness and much more. We hope that the critical-communications organizations reap the rewards of application development and innovation that characterize the commercial realm.

So how do we get there? How do we go from here (LMR) to there (LTE)? What’s more, what can enterprises—transportation, utility/energy, oil and gas and more—learn from the early trials of FirstNet and public-safety broadband? This is the big question for the entire critical-communications community and the question we hope to confront at the inaugural Critical LTE Communications conference.

Around the world, public safety has begun a transition to an era of mission-critical mobile intelligence that requires smart solutions to capture, analyze and act on an exponentially expanding amount of data.

Please visit this URL to find out more information about IWCE’s Critical Communications Forum.

I hope you will join us in November and participate in the transition in North America.