TCCA Calls to Action ahead of Critical Communications Europe 2019

This week marks the 2019 edition of TCCA's Critical Communications Europe in Coventry (UK) from 12 to 13 March as the community faces a challenging but exciting and dynamic future.

Co-located with BAPCO, the event is a tremendously important opportunity for all those involved in the sector to come together in the UK to network, drive innovation, discuss challenges, explore solutions and showcase innovation that is shaping our future. TCCA Chairman, Mladen Vratonjic said: “This is great news for TCCA. We welcome the opportunity to bring a wider European community to the already successful BAPCO Show and together organise a European critical communications event. We will work hard to the benefit of all our members to ensure they receive even more value from this combined event."

The event is also a key opportunity to implement the TCCA White Paper - PPDR Roadmap for evolution from LMR/PMR to 4G/5G, which zooms in on the standardisation and procurement processes, highlighting the windows of opportunity to make the transition to LTE/3GPP standards, defining the transition from narrowband to operational mission-critical broadband, where “operational” refers to a trusted service that allows the operational use of mission-critical communications by police, fire, rescue officers in safe conditions. Services must therefore be available, everywhere under guarantee, and with penalties for unavailability.

Government organisations are key to enabling the evolution towards trusted broadband services, where the role of TCCA is to catalyse an open, multi-vendor market worldwide and support collaboration across the entire critical communications ecosystem.

The roadmap is primarily aimed at users of the TETRA network, which will continue to run in the meantime. There is scope to share the network across other verticals, especially critical infrastructures. It is a major investment for operators but PPDR has a big procurement power to convince operators to support 5G rollout. MNOs could grasp the opportunity to be a frontrunner in high-quality public safety procurement.

Calls for Action for the Critical Communications Community and Stakeholders

The transition to 5G has already started, and a lot of standardisation work has already been done on the long road to a full 5G system for critical communications.

All stakeholders with a remit for public protection and disaster relief need to act NOW. They need to work together with a strong common voice, stressing the importance of interoperability and standardisation, as well as work on legislation for broadband. 

These efforts are underpinned by a series of TCCA collaborations, spanning:

1. Interoperability Plugfests: where TCCA partners with ETSI to verify capabilities and mutual understanding of the standards. More testing is planned for 2019 and beyond. Testing on MC PTT will cover data and vendor aspects so it’s very important that vendors take part in the Plugfests.
2. NIST-sponsored Open Source platform and APIs: making it much easier to test and differentiate between applications ad devices.
3. Global Certification Forum for certification.
4. 3GPP is encouraging nations and governments to join the work in 3GPP and gain benefits of pushing requirements. The window of opportunity for MNOs is not only for PPDR but for all critical infrastructures, including V2X, utilities and smart cities.

About TCCA

The Critical Communications Association (TCCA) drives the development of globally applicable open standards. TCCA advocates open global mobile communications standards as subject-matter experts by informing and influencing the direction of the industry. The 3GPP is a key forum for driving open standards, with TCCA becoming its first market representation partner, paving the way for other verticals to follow suite.