Now if we take this idea to the critical communications world, we can think of a firefighter with a sense-enabled T-shirt. So you’re moving from voice – hearing and talking – first of all to visual alerts but now also to feeling, sensing. You get the command ‘Go!’ and your shirt pushes you. Or if you get the command to back off, it tries to pull you away.

How many things could you guide by such movements? In a noisy or smoky environment, how much would you understand when somebody squeezes you?

Today, I would say we are in a world where the technology is not the limiting factor – it’s our imagination and what we can do with it.

Our environment

My other factor is the environment. If we look at the environment, of course there’s a regulatory framework which is very important, especially in the line of business where we are. It’s the spectrum, it’s standards, it’s legislation in general.

We are having a great debate on seeking broadband spectrum. That’s all influencing the sandbox where one is allowed to play. And that defines a whole lot of innovation we can use.

We are so dependent on our electricity today, so let’s take that as an example. If there is no electricity, the actions of authority stop after a while. Everything stops. Cyber terrorism is a major concern, and that might persuade us to isolate our secure networks completely. Yet at the same time, in order to be efficient and to have information flowing, we need to have very free networking.

Furthermore, we are now so globalized that whatever happens somewhere, it has an influence on us – be it in the economy, be it on the environment, be it anywhere else. We are pretty much defined by how the environment is, but we need to be adaptive to risks and requirements which are not even known today.

Facebook, Google: 10 years ago, who would have thought about them? Today, if the regulatory framework doesn’t react to such developments, we are losing competitive advantage.

So we have many needs but in this same society we have many stakeholders – in transport, in border security, in maritime, in major events like the Olympics. From a critical communications point of view, what brings them together each time is the need for availability, for security and for interoperability – to be able to do the tasks that society is requesting from them. That is what we need to think of when we consider our three dimensions.

To achieve that requires, I think, a baseline of trust. Without trust there is nothing. We need to trust the other human being in order to be able to co-operate. Trusting also means knowing and understanding how far one can trust them. It’s the same for solutions, systems and ways of working.

What we now see very strongly is voice and data coming together. The world of tomorrow is information-centric, where there is no separation between what is voice and what is information, what’s data. Once you have trust, information translates to knowledge – to knowledge of whether it is best for machines to take care of actions without human beings involved. But also it translates to wisdom, in the sense that you understand what this information means – what kind of action it causes and expects and results in. And that translates then into creation. So it’s about an entire way of working from beginning to end, understanding the dependencies.

Reinventing work

Let’s look at the roadmap. The previous decade was the decade of transition from analogue to digital. The current decade I see as the decade to invent information-centric ways of working, and to gain real benefits for society.

From the technology point of view, it’s very clear that the best narrowband technology there is for critical communications is TETRA, and that will remain true. Whenever you have access only to narrowband spectrum, your choice is TETRA – and that’s for this decade, the next decade and the decade after, and we don’t see it changing.

We see TETRA evolving constantly. We see it addressing the needs of the users, with the introduction of TEDS and later on with the introduction of voice-over-TEDS, when it will bring further spectrum efficiency and capacity.

With narrowband, you cannot just put five video streams through a TEDS channel. Instead you must rely on the broadband wireless services that are available today; solutions that are basically commercial networks. They are perfect when it’s a sunny day – and for a lot of value-adding features, they are very good to have. Multi-network routers can improve them, but you can’t base your way of working on that.

Critical broadband

The part that we are really strongly working on at TCCA is critical broadband. Critical broadband enables you to trust it. But there’s still a big question about spectrum. The technology doesn’t help if you don’t have a place in the spectrum where you can put it. So that is likely to be an issue for the next decade, dictated pretty much by how the World Radio Conference 2015 goes. So let’s everyone do our job and get more spectrum for those who keep us alive.
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