Global marketplace critical to success of public-safety broadband initiatives

Last week, I was lucky enough to attend the first meeting of the International Forum to Advance First Responder Innovation, where representatives from Germany, Israel, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States discussed some of the challenges they encounter in the public-safety space.

There were some notable differences. For instance, the United States seems to have a much broader concept of what incidents fire departments should handle, while many other countries assign those tasks to law-enforcement agencies. Some countries face communications issues created by the fact that multiple languages are spoken prevalently in different areas. In addition, the structure of public safety varies greatly across the world—some emphasize state and local entities, while other countries have national public safety.

But these differences were not nearly as significant as the similarities that the representatives shared.

And that makes complete sense. Sure, there are political/social/economic nuances in each geographic region, but the fundamental issues facing public safety are shared by everyone.

After all, the flames of a fire in Germany burn just as hot as those in Israel. Encountering a gunman is just as terrifying in the United Kingdom as it is in the United States. Coordinating an emergency evacuation is just as challenging in Canada as it is in the rest of world. And everyone is struggling to find an appropriate and effective response to cyber threats.

There is another similarity: public safety has to be very budget conscious. Even in countries where national defense entities virtually are given blank checks, domestic public-safety agencies have limited resources.

Given all of these similarities, it is remarkable how fragmented the public-safety market has become, particularly in the communications area. In the land-mobile-radio (LMR) space, the dominant technologies being deployed today are P25 and TETRA, which at least are standards. But there remain a vast number of public-safety LMR systems that utilize several different proprietary technologies—all operating in different spectrum bands, just to complicate matters.

When you combine an already fragmented market with the specialized needs for hardening/reliability, the cost of doing business in the public-safety sector goes up, and that results in higher-priced equipment. These costs look even worse in comparison to the commercial cellular market, which benefits from global standards that result in massive economies-of-scale efficiencies that drive lower prices.