'Blue Ocean’ Changes the Business Model for Public Safety Broadband

Over the last decade, we have seen huge investments into public safety networks around the world. Investments into TETRA and P25 with country-wide coverage are beeing implemented in many countries. Now, as the voice based solutiions cannot provide high data communication, many of the traditional manufacturers bet on on selling new broadband networks the same way as they did with voice communications in the past.

According to Juhani Lehtonen, VP Sales & Marketing of Goodmill Systems Ltd., there is a new concept named: ‘Blue Ocean’, that changes the business model for public safety broadband. Lehtonen says in his Blog that this is good news for the taxpayers, but poses a significant risk for the previous rulers of the marketplace. 

This term BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY (BOS), focuses on the idea is that you don’t only develop and enhance your offering to win markets, but you can redefine it by introducing aspects of elimination and reduction.

With the new model, Lehtonen says that it is possible to reduce or even eliminate investments into new networks and simultaneously improve data security, reliability, coverage and resilience. And all this at a fraction of the cost of the old business model.

As an example, although digital networks fulfill a good job, there are situations where TETRA, Tetrapol or P25 networks have been down or unusable due to;

• congestion problems (Schiphol Turkish Airlines disaster  C2000 Network)
• storms and other natural catastrophes (For example the C3 TETRA network in Sint Maarten during hurricane Irma) 

The fact, that when there’s nothing important going on, the networks are almost empty, using even as little as 2-5% of their capacity. This all means that there is a huge investment standing unused most the time.  Therefore, Lehtonen asks the question: Do we really need dedicated networks in the future? 

ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES

The new strategic alternative comes from eliminating the need for new networks. There are already solutions for fixed landline based internet where dedicated secure networks are built inside a commercially available one. VPN tunneling or MPLS technologies are commonly used in the PS sector today. The solution is to combine commercial networks, as many as one wishes, and use secure tunnels inside them. This way, the existing infrastructure of all mobile operators can be used, taking advantage of the resilience, availability and operational security they can serve together. This is very important to understand: the existing, separate networks can offer these benefits when used in unison. The same reason we have two ears and eyes. It is possible using these separate networks to have secure tunneling running simultaneously across them all. This means that the costs of the solution are magnitudes lower than building an entirely new network anywhere with any significant coverage.

Ckick here to download the Whitepaper