South Korea, UK aim for completion of public-safety LTE deployments next year

Buildout of the 18,000-site ESN is scheduled to be finished in September 2017, when public-safety entities are expected to begin a 27-month transition from the Airwave TETRA network—a system that costs about 1 milion pounds per day to use—to the LTE-based platform. Current plans call for all British first responders to abandon the Airwave TETRA network in December 2019.

“The [Airwave] contract expires in December 2019, but we can extend it, if we need to—we’ve got that as a backup mechanism,” Hewlett said. “But we’re doing our best to try to make sure that we’ve got everybody off [of the Airwave system] by then.”

Despite the UK government’s considerable financial incentives to stop use of the Airwave TETRA network, first-responder entities will have crucial input into the transition timing, Hewlett said.

“We will go as fast as we can to get this built,” he said. “But, if the system isn’t ready, we don’t go live.”

In Canada, the government has allocated 10×10 MHz of 700 MHz spectrum—harmonized with FirstNet’s spectrum—for a public-safety broadband network, but many key details have not been determined yet, according to Joe Fournier of the Canadian Federal Government’s Center for Security Science (CSS). Canadian officials want their system to support interoperability with FirstNet, but key questions regarding the governance and business models to support the proposed public-safety broadband network (PSBN) still need to be addressed, he said.

 “There are still a lot of decisions to be made,” Fournier said during his presentation. “We’re still in the process of defining our FirstNet.”

Fournier said he expects the Canadian public-safety LTE system to depend significantly on deployable solutions that can support first-responder communications in the vast rural areas of the country. In addition, a series of public-safety LTE demonstrations conducted along the U.S.-Canada border have provided clear indications that such a network would be very beneficial, he said.

“We now have an environment in Canada that is very serious about moving public-safety broadband forward,” Fournier said. “I won’t give any dates, but I will say there is an absolute, definite appetite by decision makers.in Canada to start implementing our PSBN in very short order after the first instances of FirstNet get implemented.”