Motorola Posts Q2 Growth, Targets Public Safety Partnerships across Country
Motorola, which signed an agreement with San Francisco Bay Area public safety agencies to deploy an LTE network, sees interest from major cities throughout the country, Bob Schassler, vice president of North America Government Markets, said in an interview Thursday. Meanwhile, the company posted a Q2 net income of $162 million versus $26 million a year ago.
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Virtually all major cities are interested in deployment of next generation public safety systems, Schassler said, citing New York, Boston, Washington, Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston and Dallas. There should always be public-private partnerships for public safety networks, he said. It’s not economical to deploy a private system throughout the entire geography of a particular region, he said. “I don’t really see a situation in any city where you won’t have that scenario,” he said. Public networks and private networks can complement each other, he said.
Regarding whether commercial operators could justify the expense of granting public safety priority-access roaming the way first-responders want, Schassler said it’s a matter of economics. The challenge for commercial operators is the ability for their networks to handle additional capacity requirements from public-safety users during an incident, he said. Major LTE operators have acknowledged the issue, he said.
Securing additional spectrum for public safety is a top challenge in the future of first-responder communications, Schassler said. Another challenge is initial funding, he said. Once the network is up and running, there will be a very clear return on investment, he said. Motorola supports reallocating the 700 MHz D Block from commercial use to public safety. Motorola’s approach on pushing D Block reallocation is to state the technical facts so that everyone makes an informed decision, Schassler said.
Public safety agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area are interested in services and applications that obtain real-time geolocation information about things like damage situation, road conditions and personnel location, Schassler said. Applications that allow data and video file transfers and real-time video streaming would also be a major part of services running on the 700 MHz LTE network, he said. Agencies in the Bay Area are also interested in the idea of virtual command center, he said.
Video will be a big part of the first-responders toolbox, Schassler said. The challenge with public safety is that every incident is different, demanding a different level of priority access, he said. He cited Motorola’s prioritization capability of the LTE technology to deal with bandwidth issues.
The Bay Area network, announced Thursday, will be installed this year and is expected to be operational in early 2011. The first phase includes an LTE core, 10 sites and 330 Motorola public safety LTE user modems to provide Bay Area responders access to a host of media rich applications delivered over the new network for increased public safety information sharing. The system will serve multiple agencies across the greater bay area, including San Francisco, Alameda County/Oakland, Contra Costa County, as well as the cities of Santa Clara and Sunnyvale.
Meanwhile, like the last several quarters, much of Motorola’s Q2 profit came from enterprise mobile unit and network equipment unit, which will be sold to Nokia Siemens for $1.2 billion. The manufacturer shipped 2.7 million smartphones in the quarter. Co-CEO Sanjay Jha stuck to his estimate of 12 million to 14 million smartphones shipped for the year during a conference call Thursday. The networks business is expected to post a full-year sales decline of 10 percent, co-CEO Greg Brown said. Q3 sales are expected to be comparable to the second quarter, with margins slightly lower, he added. Motorola plans its split in Q1 next year.