South Korea plans to deploy mission-critical PTT over LTE this year
In the United Kingdom, officials plan to replace the Airwave TETRA system with public-safety LTE, according to Gordon Shipley, program director for emergency mobile communications services at The Home Office—the UK ministerial department responsible for security and public safety.
“[Airwave is] a private network that covers the whole of the UK, and it does a very good job,” Shipley said during the PSCR meeting in June. “But it’s voice-only, it’s extremely expensive—as private-finance initiatives often are toward the end of the contract period—and we’re going to have to recompete it.
“But one of the key missing components of Airwave is broadband, and the emergency services now buy … from mobile operators broadband services, tablets and smartphone. So we have, in effect, a dual system meeting the complete needs of emergency services.”
Shipley said UK officials hope to avoid the pitfalls of the current Airwave contract as public-safety communications migrate to LTE by providing a better service that is less expensive for first-responder organizations. Like South Korea, the UK plans to move to public-safety LTE quickly.
“We need to get it into service by 2017, so we’re on the same flight path as Korea,” Shipley said. “And we must have it complete by 2020, because come May of 2020, the contract runs out, and we’re supposed to be off of Airwave—and the way the contract is set out, it’s unclear exactly how we would extend it.”
Currently, 3GPP is not expected to complete the MCPTT standard until March 2016, and Thiessen has said it is likely that the process could be delayed by three to six months. Despite this, the UK plans to proceed with its public-safety LTE initiative at its current timetable using pre-standard public-safety LTE, with the stipulation that the provider will adhere to the 3GPP standards when they are completed, Shipley said.