By Mae Kowalke
Quick: in an emergency, what’s helps the most to save lives?
No, it’s not food, water, or shelter. According to George Ed Ryan, Director of Communications for the State of Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, the most vital element related to public safety is: information.
This is especially true when it comes to preventing terrorist attacks. And, the next generation of mobile communications technology is already being envisioned as a key element to keeping people safe.
“Having a universally-adopted, globally-accepted LTE mobile broadband infrastructure will enable the next generation of terrorism prevention and response,” Ryan said in an Alcatel-Lucent LifeTalk article. “For example, ad-hoc, situation-specific, real-time video surveillance feeds made available to otherwise unrelated law enforcement agencies may one day help to prevent a multiple-location terrorist attack.”
There are a variety of elements involved in such a system, including monitoring remote locations with fixed video cameras and radar, and transmitting relevant information to officers. Ryan said that 700 MHz 4G LTE broadband provides the type of wide area coverage needed.
In particular, the capabilities of modern smartphones using 4G networks to send and receive photos and streaming video, in addition to text messages, has great potential to improve public safety.
Using this technology, “citizens can help themselves by becoming active participants in the law enforcement, firefighting, and EMT processes,” said Bill Schrier, Chief Technology Officer for the City of Seattle, in a LifeTalk article.
And, since about 97 percent of the population owns a cell phone – and about two-thirds of those are smartphones – there is huge potential for citizens to use the tools at their disposal to report valuable information in emergencies.
“Every citizen can become something of a deputy police officer, or a potential support person for firefighters and EMTs,” Schrier noted in the article.
But, so far, this potential is mostly unrealized. Why?
“Most of the obstacles to implementation of rich media in public safety communications are workflow-related,” Schrier explained.
For example, dispatch systems can’t process text, photos, and video from the public, or send this type of info out to the public. Commercial carrier networks aren’t appropriate for this application, at least not yet, because public safety traffic isn’t prioritized differently than any other traffic.
“4G LTE networks will help resolve this dilemma by virtue of their greater capacity to carry information, as soon as the technology has penetrated the market sufficiently to realize the increased bandwidth and better reliability,” Schrier said.
Preventing and dealing with all kinds of emergencies – including potential terrorist attacks, and urban crime – now virtually requires using mobile broadband technologies.
That’s because police forces around the country have been reduced in size due to budget cuts, so the remaining officers are relying more on mobile technologies like 4G LTE to do their jobs more efficiently.
As this technology becomes more vital, it raises another issue: interoperability – or, rather, the lack thereof.
For example, Jack Parow, President and Chairman of the Board of International Association of Fire Chiefs, said in a LifeTalk article that, because of interoperability issues, he might need as many as six separate radios in his command vehicle to talk to people from different public safety departments. That’s quite inefficient.
“It has become imperative that all the public safety disciplines work efficiently together,” Parow said in the article. “To do otherwise can not only cost money, it can cost lives.”
Mobile broadband capabilities will also make things more efficient for public safety officers by allowing them to remotely process information – like fingerprints – about criminal suspects, rather than taking the time (which costs money) to physically bring them to the police station.
Most of today’s public safety agencies, though, continue to rely on 3G mobile technology. What they need, said Philippe Agard, Vice President of Public Safety at Alcatel-Lucent, in a LifeTalk article, is a dedicated LTE 4G mobile broadband network, capable of handling text, photos and video.
“With the capabilities promised by the more advanced technology of 4G LTE mobile broadband, there are many opportunities for improvements to the interaction between the public safety forces and the citizens they serve,” Agard said in the article. “It’s clear that public safety still needs its own dedicated network.”
That network needs to be built using an infrastructure that all public safety agencies can plug into, with a standardized communications platform for rapidly sharing visual information. 4G LTE will turn this vision into a reality.
