A main focus of current activity within the TETRA and Critical Communications Association is its Critical Communications Broadband Group (CCBG), which was formed in March this year.

“What we’re all about as a group is to drive forward the agenda for broadband provision, specifically to critical communications users”, explained chairman Tony Gray. “We are adopting a platform of trying to globalize this whole effort towards providing broadband services for mission-critical and business-critical users. And in that sense we are forming, already, working allegiances and partnerships with other like-minded and like-functioning groups around the world.

“The US has been very successful in, rather more, the public safety sector focus. They already have 10+10?MHz of spectrum in the 700?MHz band, specifically aligned for LTE, and they have another US$7 billion assigned by the Obama administration to start to roll out mission-critical broadband networks. So we’re working closely with them, working closely with other groups – for example, 3GPP, the standardization body responsible for LTE.

“We are forming relationships and contacts there where we hope to be able to promote the agenda, which is that there are certain aspects of the LTE standard that we need enhanced or added to in order to support mission-critical functions.

“I’m talking specifically about, for example, group working. As you will be aware, commercial technologies such as LTE are typically about one-to-one communication. In the mission- and business-critical world, we very much need group communication in the same way as we have it in TETRA.

“Another aspect we need to work on with 3GPP, to have incorporated in the LTE standard, is what we call in the TETRA world Direct Mode – that is, terminal to terminal, outside the infrastructure.

“Those kinds of features are not necessarily a prime requirement of the commercial operators, but they are very much an important feature of what our critical communications users need.”