People at the time forgot that SMS was a store-and-forward service which wasn’t suitable for real-time situations because messages could be delayed and there was no guarantee of delivery.

“Interestingly,” Cassidian’s Gillan adds, “when we actually did some research amongst the youth market – supposedly the ones hungry to use this newish technology – we actually found that the vast majority preferred the reassurance and immediacy of talking to a human operator. There are, however, important roles for SMS in some situations, such as interacting with speech- or hearing-impaired callers, reverse notification that action is underway or in pushing important information out to communities. Some corporations are also using this technology to broadcast alerts to their staff in critical situations.”

Erosion of boundaries

If SMS was the fashionable acronym then, then M2M (machine-to-machine) communications is the flavour of the year now. While the GSMA has its Embedded Devices programme, many other companies are focusing on the huge potential this approach has – such as Ericsson with its 50 Billion connected devices program and HP with its CeNSE project – Central Nervous System for Earth.

While visions and hype naturally abound, it is already clear to see that new types of sensors and the continued drive to add connectivity to all manner of things has the potential to change the emergency service environment. With cars increasingly being equipped with communications and smart monitoring equipment, capable of sending out alerts for example in the event of a crash, it’s easy to see how data coming from these sources could be integrated with road monitoring CCTV systems to quickly co-ordinate the kinds of multi-agency responses that are often needed in these situations. All, potentially, without anyone at the incident actually having to report an emergency in traditional ways.

The problems that the control centres of today and the near future face are not new and have been faced – and are being resolved – by other industries. The erosion of traditional boundaries, the need to manage ever higher levels of complexity in real time, the explosion in data and the drive to turn it into useful and actionable information plus a vital need to reduce operational costs – all these would be familiar to IT and communication strategists in many other sectors. The difference is that public safety communications demands life-critical answers – not just mission-critical ones.