Ohio officials applaud data experiences during LTE exercise, say voice comms need work

Castle said the LTE push-to-talk application seemed to work well and interoperate with the LMR network, but “cell phones just aren’t loud enough, frankly, in a push-to-talk situation.”

David Walker, Motorola Solutions’ territory sales vice president, said the push-to-talk issues are understandable.

“I think it was the result of users comparing an LTE commercial-grade device to a public-safety land-mobile-radio [LMR] device—the speaker and power are completely different,” Walker said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, really.”

Schmahl said that another problem experienced with the LTE devices was inconsistent battery life—some devices easily lasted a full shift, while others were almost drained at the halfway mark.

 “There was constant activity going on, because these were pilot scenarios,” Schmahl, said. “I think, in the real world, there’s going to be some downtime where they’re not hitting that device constantly and having the screen lit almost nonstop.

“In real life, that can happen, too. So we pushed everything as hard as we could to make sure that the vendors could get on board and get some public-safety-grade devices out there.”

Schmahl said the ability to learn such lessons in a trial setting is the biggest value to all who participated in the exercises, from first responders to the vendors. These efforts can contribute to making FirstNet better, he said.

“We were happy that the different vendors contributed different devices to be tested,” Schmahl said. “It shows dedication on their part that, before FirstNet actually gets stood up and is a functioning network that people can get on, there will be devices that are public-safety-grade because of doing tests like this in our pilot.”

“They can go back to their engineers and their programmers to say, ‘Why did these two apps cause the battery to drain?’ I’m sure they’re going to be able to figure out what it was, apply some patches and get that fixed.”