We’ve gone steaming ahead on two tracks: first of all, organizing ourselves and starting to get work done and secondly on trying to put in place more international relationships with other stakeholders and interested parties and equally with other groups.

In the work itself, we’ve also been very busy. Fundamentally it’s broken into three working groups: systems and architecture (SA), user requirement (UR) and business case (BC). Each of those right now has at least 15 or more individuals contributing and working.

Particularly the SA, systems and architecture, has been helping to drive forward the work in 3GPP. Philippe Devos’s group has produced a number of use cases which have gone into 3GPP SA1, which is kind of the starting point – if you don’t go beyond that, you go nowhere.

It’s all about the fundamental requirement of group working and Direct Mode and – to the side of that, but nonetheless perceived as important for the longer term – PTT-style fast call setup, but in a data way. And Voice over LTE, for the longer term.

For the meantime, we are focusing very much on those two critical items of group working and Direct Mode. Direct mode, which in 3GPP-speak is called ProSe (standing for Proximity Services) – that has been accepted as a work item and it is going forward. We don’t know in what shape or form just yet, but at least it’s off the starting blocks.

Group working is currently more difficult because we have a lot more convincing to do of some of the 3GPP participants, particularly the network operators, that there is truly a reason and a case for having group working incorporated in the standard. Some arguments say that it could equally well be done at the service layer, as an IMS implementation, rather than having direct hooks in the standard itself. So we are working very hard, again with NPSTC (the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council of the USA) and other contributors to 3GPP, to try to get that moved forward. 

Have you set yourselves a goal or a deadline?

It sounds a bit glib, but we just keep saying “as soon as possible”. There is no formal deadline. The twin core aims are to justify and acquire spectrum and the standardization, but we need to have features and facilities in LTE. Those are driven by external factors that we can’t influence; but the sooner that we can put the cases forward and argue the
cases, the sooner we may have a chance of achieving our ultimate aims.

The standardization obviously is entirely in the hands of 3GPP, and regulators are regulators. 

We have those three core working groups, but the three that I have described obviously have nothing to do with spectrum. So, sitting on the edge of that, and very much contributing and being part of the whole scene, is the already pre-existing TCCA spectrum group.

In addition to that, you have presumably got to slot your proposals into an LTE release.

Absolutely. The cut-off date for input to Release 12 is March 2013, which isn’t a lot of time. We are confident that ProSe will be there (Direct Mode), but we are pushing down to the deadline now as to whether or not group working gets into Release 12 or has to wait another year and a half to be in Release 13. It’s fingers crossed!

But you do seem to have shown that the community of interest here goes a lot wider than just TETRA, which is where you started.

Yes. It was all part of the concept of the name change of the organization. We always felt that we needed to embrace more than just public safety – and more than just TETRA. So changing to incorporate critical communications just gave that wider remit of not only all the other critical communications technologies of P25, of GSM-R, of Tetrapol, but also all the other user-bases of rail, transportation and utilities: anything business-critical, basically, as well as mission-critical. 

We are still trying to get our head around how best to approach politicians. The business case is perhaps one of the most important elements because at one level it’s very simplistic – it’s all about just persuading the holders of resource in terms of spectrum and money to part with some of that resource, to put it into the pot for critical communications broadband. But how to present that case and how to argue it most cogently is one of the most difficult things.

There have been movements in Europe – the acceptance in principle that PPDR needs spectrum and needs resources. But then how to reflect that down? That’s only a kind of recommendation at the national regulatory level. And 27 European individual regulators and states also have to be convinced and have to come up with something. It’s all very well writing down that we think PPDR is very important and needs some spectrum – but somebody has got to physically find it and it has got to be the right sort of spectrum.
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