Migration from LMR to LTE: The First Steps

LAS VEGAS -- Treading carefully by transitioning from land mobile radio (LMR) to long term evolution (LTE) push to talk capabilities for public safety and emergency management with noncritical communications is a key to beginning the move, said a panel at the International Wireless Communications Expo today in Las Vegas.
 
The timeline for the move to LTE technology could be five years, in the best-case scenario, or 50. In the meantime, beginning to manage LMR and LTE simultaneously will be necessary. Migrating some noncritical communications to LTE during a transition period is a way to test the systems, while maintaining critical communications, the panel said.
 
Dave Buchanan, Spectrum Management Committee chair for the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council, offered four key requirements for the migration to an LTE system:

• A hardened public-safety-grade system
• A system ready for mission-critical voice with push-to-talk
• Public safety coverage of the geographical area covered by LMR
• Acceptance by users that the network will work.

The latter point, panelists said will be the most important and, perhaps, the most difficult to achieve. Buchanan said jurisdictions struggled to gain buy-in when moving from UHF to 800 MHz systems and should be ready for hard work selling the LTE system. “If users don’t have confidence, it’s going to be a failure,” he said.
 
It will be critical to begin the migration using noncritical communications to “Get your toes wet,” Buchanan said, and to identify any problems with the system before going to critical communication. The transition period has to provide for “replicated coverage,” said John Lenihan, battalion chief of the Los Angeles County Fire Department. “The value of having [LMR] on your hip is invaluable.”

He said having “off-network” capabilities to offset any gaps in network coverage will be critical as well. “You have to take paths to be balanced between systems.”

Research is being done by the National Institute of Standards and Technology on the migration to determine if an LTE network can totally handle the traffic on LMR. Care will have to be taken as well to assure that an LTE network will support the data network that LMR does.

We can look to other countries that are ahead of us on this, including England, France and South Korea, which are on the “bleeding edge” of moving to LTE.