Which part of this is the most difficult bit? Is it the technical side or the finding spectrum side?

I think – it’s again a bit glib – but both are proving pretty difficult at the moment. In terms of timescale, I think it’s going to be the spectrum that will take the longest, particularly to try to get some sort of harmonized, pan-European (or even further afield) spectrum. There’s already bits and pieces of spectrum becoming available in different parts of the world – for example, Qatar in the Middle East is already implementing a public safety LTE network. In Australia, I was talking to a mining company who are right now putting LTE in some 1800 MHz that they’ve got, which sounds to me pretty mission-critical. They are using it for machine-to-machine and for autonomous vehicles, driverless trains, driverless trucks, driverless drills. They are planning to actually control these things just over the LTE network. To get that kind of application reflected across Europe or even further afield in some kind of reasonably harmonized spectrum, so that the user equipment ends up not having to have too many bands in it, is going to be a long, slow, nightmarish road, I think.

3GPP is what it is, and it has its defined timescales. I think if and when we just get over this first hurdle of acceptance that we do have to have group working, and we do need it standardized in the core standard, then things will flow as they normally do in 3GPP. And it could be by this time next year that we would have something really cogent to offer the industry to get their teeth into making equipment for.

What can readers of TETRA Today do to help?

We just need to, as widely as possible, publicize the fact that there is this fundamental need for resourcing on something that is potentially so critical.

It’s a real bugbear at the moment that, for all sorts of very reasonable and practical reasons, we don’t have nearly enough user input to all this. We have the user requirements very clearly and strongly captured, so that’s not the issue. It’s now pushing the case with politicians and with regulators. We in Europe – and I sense everywhere else in the world – are not nearly as well organized and focused as they are in the US. There is no such thing as NPSTC anywhere else in the world that essentially represents every branch of every flavour of critical communications user.

How we can find a way of motivating and activating the user base in this part of the world I really don’t know, because it’s so much more disparate.

We’ve had this discussion in the TCCA board – of how can we, as the TCCA, rather than the CCBG, try to help catalyse that. We discussed about trying to have forums or meetings or briefings where we can bring together some of these top-level individuals just try to start to get the message through.

Have you any idea of how large the community of interest is here?

At one level it doesn’t matter because if a major incident is going to happen, whether you’ve got one user or a million users, it’s still going to be a major incident and it’s going to have significant consequences. And that is what we are trying to focus on in the business cases.

We believe that the users, however many of them there might be, need this capability. And if they don’t have that capability and the next major disaster occurs, then these will be the consequences, Mr Politician. And I think it has to be as emotive as that.