Nokia: First Mission Critical Services Could Already be Available in 2018
Nokia just published a Whitepaper that makes a comparison between LTE and TETRA, which is the leading legacy technology for mission and business critical communications.
In the Whitepaper, Nokia concludes that LTE technology is a mature, reliable and widely deployed technology and that LTE technology is ready for critical mobile broadband communications.
It can be noted that the existing LTE networks globally are used for commercial consumer and enterprise services. Those LTE networks are not currently optimized for critical communications. However, Nokia says taht LTE network products can provide critical mobile broadband services if this is enabled by operators. The same LTE technology from Nokia is now also available for dedicated LTE networks.
Mission critical voice group communication is standardized and becoming commercially ready as a standards compliant solution. All the new network features for a standards-based MCPTT solution can be easily provided as software upgrades. Commercial standards-compliant end- to-end solutions are expected to be ready in early 2017. It is already possible to offer services with pre-standard group communication applications and LTE smartphones.
The Finnish company states futher that LTE network deployments for mission critical communication are ongoing or planned in Asia, Europe, the US and the Middle East. This means that the first government agencies and mission critical service providers have concluded that LTE maturity is on the right level to start modernizing critical communications systems.
Taking into account the key TETRA services (voice and messaging) and assuming that TETRA replacement is acceptable only with a fully standard mission critical LTE system, 3GPP Release 14 enhancements are needed. This means that the first 3GPP standards compliant LTE systems supporting all relevant mission critical services could be available in 2018.
