UK Emergency Services - Beyond TETRA and looking into LTE

The UK Government is currently trying to identify the future shape of mission critical communications for its Blue Light services under the Emergency Services Mobile Communications Programme (ESMCP), which is likely to go out to tender in 2015.

At the moment, the police, fire and ambulance services receive voice and limited data services from a private, dedicated TETRA two-way radio network, funded, built and managed under a private finance initiative contract by Airwave Solutions.

Contracts with Airwave will begin to run out in 2016 with the last ones terminating at the end of 2020. The received wisdom is that at some point in the future the emergency services will augment and eventually replace existing TETRA narrowband services with broadband services - most probably a form of the cellular radio standard 4G LTE (long term evolution).

This can probably only be provided by a partnership of existing commercial cellular operators, as a direct result of cost constraints (the equivalent of the PFI investment presently on narrowband), as the US experience has shown.

Mission Critical LTE

The Critical Communications Broadband Group (CCBG), a Working Group of the TETRA + Critical Communications Association, is working with the standards body 3GPP to incorporate mission critical functionality into the LTE standard.

CCBG has identified four key areas to be addressed within the LTE standards to enable a suitable foundation for critical communications services. These are:

• Group communications system enablers for LTE

• Proximity-based services

• Public safety networks resiliency

• Push-to-talk (PTT) voice application standard over LTE and its evolution toward multimedia (voice, data, video, etc.) group communications.

In March this year, CCBG published a timeline for when these key functions might be incorporated in the LTE standard. It believes that LTE-based data services for mission critical communications will not be available until 2018 at the earliest and that acceptable quality voice services over LTE for mission critical users are not expected until at least 2020.

What is clear, therefore, is that the range of essential mission critical functions provided by TETRA, and deemed necessary by the emergency services to do their job, will not be available on LTE by the time the ESMCP contract has to be let. What then is the UK Government to do in the interim? Another equally vexed question is: who will provide the broadband network for the emergency services?

The two main choices are: build a new dedicated broadband network for exclusive use by the emergency services and perhaps other organisations and industries deemed vital to the national interest; or, use an existing network supplier - probably one or more of the UK’s commercial mobile phone operators, who are currently building out 4G LTE networks.

The first option (provided the spectrum can be found to run the new network on - see box) ensures the emergency services have a robust and resilient network that they can control. But it will be very expensive to build and the UK exchequer is hardly overflowing with surplus cash at the moment.

Commercial Options

The second option makes use of existing commercial cellular networks (and potentially Wi-Fi), but ones that lack the necessary resilience for mission critical services. A major concern for public safety organisations with this arrangement is that it may not give them enough control of spectrum resources when they need them.

What became apparent at the B-APCO session, if unsaid directly by anyone, was that if the emergency services want access to broadband data services in the near future, then there is only one realistic bearer option - namely, commercial mobile operators.

The O2 and Vodafone representatives at the session explained that their joint Beacon project would provide 18,500 2G, 3G and 4G masts by 2015. Voice over LTE services would be available by 2015 for the emergency services, but what this means in reality is a fallback service to 2G/3G.