TCCA demonstrates Focus on Future Critical Communication Technologies at 5G World

The 5GWorld event recently took place in London. In a message to its members, the CEO of the TCCA, Phil Kidner said that during the event, there was plenty of talk about 5G development – yet, clear recognition that the standardization is in its’ early state. Pre-standard implementations will demonstrate some of the capabilities in a limited scale, but the business for the operators still needs to be proven.

In the Public Safety stream in the morning session the status of critical communications in the 3GPP standardization was covered very thoroughly by Dave Chater-Lea, 3GPP SA6 vice-chairman. He was followed by Ed Parkinson who presented the status and goal setting of FirstNet in the USA.

As LTE and 5G are most of all about data and the new way of working, at the event, the TCCA Application working group clearly delivered the value of data for critical communications. This was complemented by a case study from Finland presented by Heikki Riippa from the Finnish Police and Tero Pesonen, CCBG chairman on how to address the critical broadband data needs and define the steps to move to critical broadband in a controlled and managed way.

In the afternoon an update of the spectrum situation was given by the TCCA Spectrum director, who called everyone to help on ensuring also the usability of the 700 MHz guard band.

Furthermore, an update on the Horizon 2020 Broadmap project was given. The Horizon 2020 Broadmap project is defining the pan-European PPDR needs for broadband communication. A major step realizing these requirements is the ASTRID blue lightmobile MVNO solution that was presented by Daniel Hache, ASTRID External Relations Director.

In addition, there were two panel sessions on the differences of critical communications networks for different stake holders and the required building blocks for them.