NIST Looking at How Public Safety Will Use 700 MHz Spectrum
Tests in Boulder, Colo., are studying questions raised as public safety systems make sure of LTE for the first 700 MHz network deployments, the manager of the National Institute of Standards and Testing’s Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) program said Tuesday in a speech at the FCC. Dereck Orr also said the program will run a second set of tests in Washington to examine a public safety network in a real city. NIST will also consider a permanent “testbed” in Boulder to take up problems as they appear, he said.
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LTE is “a bleeding edge” technology, Orr said. “Most of us in this room have not used an LTE device,” he said. “It is something that is very new. It’s not thoroughly understood.” Wireless carriers and others in the industry “are doing a whole host of tests right now on LTE from a commercial perspective,” Orr said. “We don’t want to redo any of that.” Public officials will be invited to watch, he said. Most “haven’t gotten their hands on it,” Orr said. “They haven’t seen what it can do.”
The work of the NIST research program must be focused, Orr said. “We are pretty picky about what we work on,” he said. “We try to ensure that if you're going to put our time and effort into something that it’s something that’s going to turn around a large bang for the buck. … We don’t just do random R&D.”
The program’s growing emphasis is broadband, Orr said. “There’s a lot of excitement about what’s going to be coming down the pike for public safety,” he said. “Everyone is excited at the thought of a nationwide network. … We want to leverage some of the lessons learned that we've gathered from our work” in land mobile radio “and other technologies and apply them to broadband.”
Getting special attention are the requirements that public safety will have for streaming video on the network, Orr said. “That’s going to directly impact the kind of bandwidth they're going to need,” he said. PSCR has already determined that first responders usually don’t need HD video, Orr said. “There’s very few situations in which HD was required,” he said. “That was a lesson learned for us that we weren’t really expecting.” Tests are looking at the effects of target size, motion in a scene, compression and lighting on video used by public safety officials, he said.
Orr warned that for public safety agencies, dealing with an LTE world will be very different from their experience with conventional P25 radios. He said meetings about P25 are attended on average by 100 people, who stay a room for a series of meetings over a week.
Orr said he recently attended a technical meeting on LTE in San Francisco. “There were 2,000 people, 24 concurrent sessions, a thousand documents done in a week,” he said. “Public safety doing anything in this environment is very different than doing it in a P25 environment, and we're going to have to be smart about it.”