Huawei Director foresees challenges when Commercial LTE Networks are directly used for Public Safety Services

In the interview, Alex Ai confirms that trunked radio systems are currently evolving from narrowband to broadband and from private networks to public networks. Traditional trunked radio technologies were developed for narrowband private-network communications. Narrowband technologies are voice-centric. They do not support high-speed data services, such as video and multimedia. In addition, the private-network architecture creates a variety of issues, including closed industry chains, high equipment and network construction costs, expensive terminals, and high maintenance costs. These technologies do not meet customers’ business needs.

Huawei believes there will be special challenges if commercial LTE networks are directly used for public safety services. According to Alex Ai, it is important to enhance LTE network abilities to address public safety emergencies and improvments are neccesary to the different aspects of LTE networks, including QoS, MCPTT, and congestion control. Moreover, an ecosystem of end-to-end products and solutions are needed to help operators rapidly deploy trunking services and seize market opportunities. These products and solutions include the application platform, dispatch consoles, apps, and anti-shock, waterproof and dustproof terminals.

Ai continues in his interview: "This is where LiTRA comes in. The Huawei-developed professional trunked radio solution that complies with 3GPP specifications and is based on public LTE networks. This solution aims at helping operators build secure, efficient, and professional LTE networks to provide public-safety services."

According to Ai, PTT over LTE, represented by LiTRA, addresses many issues. With the high bandwidth and low latency of LTE networks, LiTRA not only rivals traditional trunked radio systems in performance, but also provides professional multimedia trunking services, which includes video calls, video surveillance, file transfer, and GIS services.

More important, however, is that LiTRA is deployed using operators’ existing LTE networks. This significantly reduces network construction and maintenance costs, provides better network coverage and roaming services, and is compatible with smart LTE terminals. In this sense, LiTRA breaks out of the closed industry chain and can provide more professional, more efficient trunking services.