New Jersey, Pennsylvania officials highlight successful public-safety LTE use during papal visit

Williams said that the statewide LMR system served as the primary means of communication for law enforcement during the papal visit, but LTE communications supplemented and interoperated with the LMR network.

“Because [JerseyNet LTE] was not our primary means of communication, it was not utilized extensively by a lot of people,” Williams said. “But those who did use it found that it worked very well. They had phone capabilities and video capabilities.”

Given the success of this deployment, Williams said he would like to expand the partnership with New Jersey next year to provide similar capabilities over a greater geographic area when Philadelphia host the Democratic National Convention next year.

Scalera said the Mutualink solution that is designed to support interoperability and seamless roaming as a user travels between the Band 14 public-safety network and commercial wireless coverage “worked perfectly” during the papal visit.

Scalera said that all sites in the JerseyNet system were completed by the Sept. 30 deadline mandated by law as part of the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) that funded the public-safety LTE system. Now that the papal visit is complete, JerseyNet officials will focus on testing and optimizing the network, with the hope of being able to begin running some applications on the system within a month, Scalera said.