On July 5th, 2013 Detroit’s Emergency Dispatch System used for communication between 911 dispatchers and police, fire and EMS crews went down. Over 60 “Priority 1” calls and 170 non-emergency callers were left without the help of emergency services. Effective communication between dispatchers and emergency services is vital to public safety and a lapse, no matter how brief, puts lives in danger. This is why many of the world’s emergency communication systems are beginning to use LTE (Long-Term Evolution) compatible technology which enhances communication capacity, speed and reliability.
The Global Public Safety LTE Market is an emerging market that with the sole purpose of providing LTE services to emergency communications networks. When TeliaSonera launched the first LTE (Long-Term Evolution) Network in December 2009, the World wasn’t quite ready for it. In fact, it took a full year for Samsung to design the first LTE compatible smartphone, and another year on top of that to release the first LTE compatible smartphone. However, once Samsung got the ball rolling, it didn’t take long before the Federal Communications Commission took advantage of the capabilities that an LTE network could provide.
In February 2012, legislation was passed allocating the “D Block” (a further two 5 MHz blocks adjacent to the previous broadband spectrum) to public safety, establishing the First Responder Network Authority (First Net). The goal is to create a nationwide, interoperable public-safety broadband network using an allocated US$7 billion to finance the network build.
The North American market was the first to adopt an LTE public safety network and the rest of the regions are expected to embrace LTE technology in public safety by 2014. This is a huge factor driving growth of LTE supported user devices in public safety market at a CAGR of 18.6 percent for the 2012-2016 period. Below is a list of just some of the countries with Public Safety LTE trials already underway.
As more countries transition to LTE networks for public safety communications, the investment in the market will gain momentum and is expected to cross the US$7.45 billion mark by 2016, growing at a whopping CAGR of 70.6 percent. Considering the growing interest in data-oriented services, the overall Global Public Safety LTE market, including the infrastructure and services, will contribute US$6.7 billion in revenue every year. This amount will be spread over vendors, channel partners, and network operators, contributing huge percentage to the network operations.
All things considered, the Public Safety LTE Market is only just coming out of the infancy stage and has already experienced tremendous growth which in our eyes, is a sure sign of an optimistic future.
For more information, view our 2012-2016 Global Public Safety LTE Market report.
