FirstNet to Amplify Situational Awareness for Public Safety, CTOs Say
FirstNet will be critical to enhancing public safety situational awareness in an increasingly dangerous world, said chief technology officers from major equipment vendors last week at the APCO 2016 conference in Orlando (see 1608160050). A key capability enabled by the dedicated LTE network is live-streaming video, expected to be a major part of body-worn IoT and virtual reality interfaces envisioned by companies including Motorola Solutions and Harris, the CTOs said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
Better situational awareness will help keep first responders safe, Harris CTO Dennis Martinez said in an interview. “Look at how dangerous policing has become,” he said, referring to the recent shooting of police officers in Dallas and other recent events. “I can’t think of anything worse than what we’re seeing now where police officers are being dispatched through 911 calls into an ambush.” A panel of FirstNet early builder network officials agreed that complete, unified situational awareness will likely be the killer app for public safety on FirstNet (see 1608150055).
Public safety today uses LTE from commercial service providers, said Martinez. “What is really different … is the idea that FirstNet is building a network dedicated to public safety.” Mission-critical graded live video is a major new technology that will rely on that dedicated network, Martinez said. Commercial carriers don’t want intensive data traffic from body-worn cameras on their networks, he said. FirstNet will be able to enable a range of video qualities from standard broadcast at under 1 Mbps to HDTV quality at 5-10 Mbps, he said. The network will provide public safety a number of locally controlled functions, much like it now has with land mobile radio systems but lacks on commercial LTE networks, Martinez said. Public safety will be able to control network quality, priority and pre-emption, he said. FirstNet will provide enhanced security with identity, credential and access management as a service, he said. And it will provide mission-critical services including public-safety-grade push-to-talk, he said. “For the first time, we’ll have a network in which we’ll be able to have the same kind of services we offer today in land mobile radio but in an LTE network.”
Live video enabled by the authority will be a major addition to Motorola’s “connected police officer” initiative, CTO Paul Steinberg said during a media roundtable. “At the heart of this is the assumption that everything around the individual gets smart.” Public safety users can be outfitted with sensors that collect data including biometrics and whether an officer’s weapon is in its holster, and pass it through to applications in the network that automatically can call for backup or turn on an officer’s body camera, he said. The idea is to build technology that's "second nature" for the user and responsive to the current situation, he said. Much of this can be done on existing networks but is enhanced by FirstNet, and the dedicated LTE network is critical for transferring live video, he said. Harris similarly seeks to enable a body-worn IoT environment to provide situational awareness that “is ultimately going to make [officers'] jobs safer,” said Martinez.
FirstNet is “one of the elixirs” enabling a virtual reality concept by Motorola that allows a commanding officer wearing a virtual reality headset to quickly access information about an event, including what officers are seeing and where they're located, Steinberg said. In a demo at the APCO conference, users testing an officer’s head-up display could make eye movements to access different views of an incident and tag potential targets, while head turns operated a vehicle-mounted camera in 360 degrees. It’s still “very early days” for the VR concept, with Motorola waiting for both VR and eye-tracking technologies to mature, but the company has seen interest from customers, the CTO said.
“Existing commercial broadband networks today do not offer the pre-emption capabilities that public safety needs on a broadband data network,” FirstNet CTO Jeff Bratcher said in a statement emailed Tuesday. “With FirstNet, public safety will not have to compete with commercial users for capacity when an emergency event arises; they will have full access to the 20 MHz of spectrum when they need it. In addition, the security aspects of the FirstNet network will enable mission critical technology for public safety.” Capabilities enabled by FirstNet include real-time situational awareness with multimedia, geographic information sharing, and on-the-go access to police records, building plans, hazmat information and patient healthcare data, Bratcher said.