Trial network at Ohio State offers insights about potential benefits of FirstNet system

Josh Lober, president of SLA, which developed ESChat, reported that the LTE system was linked to four LMR networks. Overall, there were 510 calls placed and 825 received over the LTE system.

“It went really well,” Lober said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “This was our first experience working with Redline—I really didn’t know anything about them in the past. They worked within the constraints of the university to get the Band 14 system installed.

“Redline did a phenomenal job … The whole event, from my perspective, went incredibly smooth.”

Lober said that ESChat has participated in other Band 14 events and the is proud of the voice quality generated by the company’s push-to-talk application, but he noted that the user experience is impacted by hardware performance—from the LTE network to the handheld devices used by public-safety officers.

“These demonstration systems give us the opportunity to understand what the challenges are and get the feedback from the users. In my view, without the right hardware, the software doesn’t matter,” Lober said, adding that he believes the Sonim Technologies devices are the “best” in the market for Band 14 use cases.

Lober also noted the importance of ESChat’s integration efforts with Intrepid Networks’ Sting application, which provides situational-awareness to first responders.

“Sting provides enhanced situational awareness, real-time information and messaging,” Lober said. “It’s specifically designed for law enforcement and public safety, and it’s fully integrated with ESChat. In fact, the version that was used is called Sting PTT.”

Intrepid Networks CEO Britt Kane said that the company’s integration of Sting with ESChat is “part of our strategy that kind of separates from other guys” in the situational-awareness market.

“We’re trying to be a pretty low-cost provider to make it accessible to all of public safety … they can’t afford 4,000 or $5,000 radios, and they can’t afford million-dollar systems anymore,” Kane said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “Our game plan is to be that base system that they would use in any incident or any kind of public event.

“We’re not CAD [computer-aided dispatch]. We don’t compete with CAD. I don’t want to say we want nothing to do with CAD, because there is a potential for integration. We’re what comes after CAD. CAD gets the people there. We’re what basically allows the commander to take over and manage the incident with our tool. Because it’s on mobile phones, it can get at the tactical level.”

Sting lets first responders receive key information in a visual format that is intuitive and efficient, Kane said. By sharing location and directional information in a map interface and distributing relevant photos—of potential suspect or victims—agencies using the Intrepid Networks’ solution have realized an 80% reduction to the traffic on their LMR systems, he said.

“A lot of the radio traffic that’s out there is ‘Where is your location? Would you repeat your location?’” Kane said. “Now, it’s all visual. We find that a lot of users are astonished that the radio traffic goes down to about 20%.

“To me, it’s very complementary to a radio network, be it PTT on cellular or their existing radios, because it gets the radio to communicate only emergency information that can’t be communicated [otherwise]—not descriptions or locations—which is what radio is supposed to be for.”