Telecom Lead India: LTE-based data services for mission critical communications will not be available till 2018.
Also, acceptable quality voice services over LTE for mission critical users are not expected till 2020, according to Critical Communications Broadband Group (CCBG), a working group of TETRA & Critical Communications Association (TCCA).
This delay is despite the ongoing roll-out of consumer LTE networks.
Implementation of critical mobile communications services over LTE demands standardisation both from 3GPP and ETSI. The TCCA CCBG is contributing to these standardisation processes to ensure consensus for critical mobile communications standards that meet users’ needs while allowing a migration and interoperability strategy for existing technologies in different regions.
Tony Gray, chair of CCBG, said: “As the world moves to LTE, it is essential that the communications industry operates in a coordinated and coherent way to bring to maturity standards relevant to Public Safety and other critical users. We are working to ensure that such requirements are incorporated into the LTE standards effectively.”
Phil Kidner, CEO of the TCCA, said: “Achieving industry synergy is crucial to ensure uninterrupted availability of mission critical communications services. LTE is currently designed for commercial use. There is no viable replacement on the horizon for the current technologies employed by critical communications users.”
There are currently 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 (3GPP GCSE_LTE); Proximity-based Services (3GPP ProSe); Public Safety Networks Resiliency, and the Push-To-Talk (PTT) voice application standard over LTE and its evolution toward multimedia (voice, data, video, etc.) group communications.
The CCBG has achieved a significant breakthrough in having the first two of these accepted by 3GPP as Work Item Descriptions (WIDs) that will be incorporated into Release 12 of the 3GPP LTE standards specification, planned for publication at the end of 2014.
Group Communications System Enablers for LTE are designed to address the 3GPP standards evolutions needed to support group communications of various media (voice, video, messaging, etc.) over LTE. Proximity-based Services are designed to address both critical communications and commercial requirements for direct mode or proximity (‘device-to-device’) services on LTE.
Critical Networks Resilience is an additional area of weakness in existing LTE network design. Compared with current critical communications technologies, there is no capacity for ‘graceful degradation of service’ should the connection between the base station and the core network be lost. The objective is to include this evolution in Release 13 of the 3GPP LTE standards specification, planned for publication at the end of 2016.
Though the first commercial LTE deployments are operational, these are for data-only services. The consumer voice evolution for LTE is still under discussion.