Public Safety Blog Series – Premium Mobile Broadband, a virtualized private LTE network

Cisco’s new Quantum Virtual Packet Core technologies and Premium Mobile Broadband will provide remarkable benefits for Public Safety, Smart Cities, Utilities, Mining and more.

Intelligence relies on the ability to create connections – to connect the unconnected – and to deliver the right information to the right person, machine or device that facilitates autonomous decision making and action.  Broadband network infrastructure technologies, such as LTE, and the Internet of Things (IoT) products and technologies are accelerating our ability to realize the benefits of the Internet of Everything (IoE) by connecting people, processes, data and things.

Public Safety is seeing a dramatic evolution of needs and realizing that the limitations of Land Mobile Radio technologies, while they do provide for mission critical communications are not sufficient to meet the all of requirements of today and the future.   Many public safety agencies have the need to support officer safety with sensors from connected devices, or machines during an emergency – sensors that detect a man-down, for example, or other biometrics.  Many personnel in public safety may have video in their vehicles, and some are wearing video giving real time information and intelligence to dispatchers and operations personnel responding to incidents. Video can also be used to support training, investigations, legal evidence, and other processes.  Some cities are deploying new Smart City applications that connect lighting, street parking, or control traffic to improve city traffic management and public safety operations.  Cities use a broad range of additional applications to deliver and support services in day to day operations.   Flexible tools and technologies are needed.

Cisco recently announced Premium Mobile Broadband Solution that allows businesses, industries, smart cities, and public safety to easily deploy private LTE services though service providers, systems integrators or by enterprises themselves.

Private LTE networks are not without the same challenges faced in commercial LTE networks, namely considerations and licensing of spectrum, and the ability of mobile devices to support designated LTE frequencies.  However for applications where frequencies are available to be licensed and used in a coordinated fashion, or licensed for use by service providers in remote areas for industrial applications such as mining, utilities, or used to restore services for emergencies and natural disasters, Private LTE networks promise to bring the same benefits of commercial LTE networks, and provide additional benefits to commercial and industrial markets.

Greater Control, Security, Flexibility, and More Choice: Cisco’s Premium Mobile Broadband promises to bring greater benefits and choice to customers who want to connect public safety applications, city services, industrial operational processes to sensors, devices, mobile devices, to improve operational efficiencies.

Open Standards based on LTE, and Virtualized!:  Premium Mobile Broadband is powered by Cisco’s Quantum Virtual Packet Core (QvPC) technologies that are used extensively by service provider LTE networks worldwide.   This means that private LTE services benefit from same LTE technologies and open standards as service provider LTE networks, but unlike public LTE networks, it also means that Private LTE networks can provide greater security, control, and a new LTE ownership model to help lower the cost of mobile broadband, while becoming a more flexible way to support industrial and public safety mission to connect people, processes, data and things to support operational and business needs.

What it means:

Public Safety, as today, will now have new capabilities to support applications over service provider LTE networks with Cisco’s Quantum Virtual Packet Core technologies. Many cities and public safety agencies already use existing service provider commercial LTE networks to support broadband data applications.  Services providers can now also deliver Premium Mobile Broadband as a managed service that can interoperate with commercial LTE services.

Public Safety can now obtain their own Private LTE network and Cisco and Cisco’s system integrators, service providers and technology partners have the ability to support end-to-end LTE solutions.

Like Public Safety, Smart Cities, Utilities and business customers can now also use and operate their own Private LTE network through services providers, systems integrators or by themselves, and use it to provide secure voice, video, data, and applications services to support operational efficiencies.

Figure 1:  Cisco PMB Solution Interconnected with MNO, From Cisco Whitepaper

An open multivendor platform for public safety broadband applications:

At IWCE 2014, Cisco demonstrated end-to-end LTE broadband networking solutions for public safety recently available for commercial and industrial applications.   These solutions showed integrated end-to-LTE system capabilities that can be deployed by large systems integrators and eco-system partners who harness the power of Cisco’s LTE  and Internet of Things technologies and applications.    In the demonstration Cisco showed how Cisco’s LTE services using Premium Mobile Broadband is put together with an E Node B (band 14) radio, and end user devices operating on Band 14 provided by eco-system technology partners, and how various public safety mobile applications can be used together to support both P25 mobile communications on mobile devices as well as native P25 over LTE, integrated to standards based P25 networks and LMR networks through Cisco IP Interoperability and Collaboration System (IPICS), with TIA compliant P25 ISSI, DFSI, or CSSI gateways, and also use Unified Communications and Collaboration that support voice, video, data.

In this demonstration video, Matt Gibbs, Cisco’s Consulting Systems Engineer for Public Sector solutions,  provides a brief overview of End-to-end LTE networking solution for public safety using Cisco Premium Mobile Broadband.

Matt Gibbs, Cisco Consulting System Engineer for Public Sector

Cisco Mobile ISR Router

With the arrival of Cisco’s Quantum Virtual Packet Core technologies and Premium Mobile Broadband, Public Safety, Smart Cities, Utilities, Mining can now utilize private, local LTE networks for critical communications or applications that can also integrate easily with existing commercial service provider networks, and with other mission critical land mobile radio or P25 radio networks.

Additional Resources:

Cisco Premium Mobile Broadband Whitepaper