Wi-Fi offers promise as an economically viable in-building technology, but work must be done to make it easily accessible for public-safety operations
By Donny Jackson, Editor, Urgent Communications
Widely deployed Wi-Fi technology could be leveraged to help address longstanding in-building wireless coverage issues for first responders and the citizens they protect, according to multiple speakers providing their insights on the topic during a webinar hosted by the Wireless Broadband Alliance.
CTO of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO), Steve Devine said he believes Wi-Fi can be a valuable augmentation—particularly inside building and other structures—to the land-mobile-radio (LMR) and 4G/5G cellular technologies already used by public safety. The recent evolution of public-safety devices suggest that a multi-network approach is more realistic now than it was several years ago, he said.
“We’re seeing now LMR devices that have LTE capabilities in the them, and they have Wi-Fi capabilities in them,” Devine said during today’s webinar. “So, we’re really seeing the opportunity for our first responders to have a deeper toolbox, with a number of connectivity options before them and the devices are agile enough to navigate across those opportunities.
“In the end, the first responder may have four or five or six different connectivity options, and they may all have their own imperfections. But there’s a degree of resiliency and redundancy in that effect. We really see that it’s a better experience for the responder to see Wi-Fi as an in-building capability.”
Vice chair of the TCCA board, Tero Pesonen said it is important to first responders that connecting to various networks not interfere with their ability to focus on their primary missions.
“Fundamentally, from a user perspective, they shouldn’t need to work any differently, regardless of the connectivity,” Pesonen said. “Particularly when you are stressed, you are tired, you are afraid, and exhausted—and then there is heat and water coming over you—that’s not the best moment to think, ‘OK, how do I use this particular connectivity versus something else?’ It should be the same as you use every day.”
Devine agreed, noting a potential approach that could help automate the process, so a device can be programmed to seek and select the best available connection for a given situation.
“I can envision a future where a responder has the ability to decide which connectivity solution is going to work best for them—this one, then this one, then this one—and to be able to build profiles within the interfaces of devices in order to do so for this particular scenario or that particular scenario, where they can manage the opportunistic capabilities of the device itself,” Devine said. “They’re less concerned about how it works; they just want it to work.”
All of the webinar speakers applauded the efforts of the Safer Buildings Coalition (SBC), which has focused attention on the in-building wireless-coverage challenges faced by first responders and the general public that must notify public-safety agencies when emergencies occur.
SBC board member Eric Toenjes said “when we can’t communicate, we’re less safe.” To this end, SBC has devoted considerable effort to helping develop fire codes and other regulations that are designed to improve in-building communications for first responders.
But the impact of such codes can be limited, which is why SBC supports the notion of public safety being able to bolster its in-building communications by leveraging Wi-Fi connectivity, Toenjes said.
“The reality is that enforcement of those codes—while it is gaining every day—is very scattered, is different everywhere you go, and it is primarily aimed at the land mobile radio and making that work, which is great,” Toenjes said. “But we really believe today that an all-of-the-above strategy is what’s needed. If we don’t make multiple different types of networks function in a critical-communications way, then we’re missing a large percentage … of buildings.
“I think we’ve accomplished a lot, as a group, but it’s still a small scratch on the surface of the number of buildings out there that really have coverage problems and communications issues that are going to rear their ugly head at some time. So the more technologies we can employ to try to solve for this—and I think Wi-Fi is an important part of that equation—the better chance we have that we can communicate in an emergency when we really need to.”
A Cisco fellow, Mark Grayson said leveraging Wi-Fi would provide a level of scale that in-building cellular solutions have not to date.
“We’ve got to recognize that 95 per cent of the market is below the threshold that traditionally has triggered cellular investment,” Grayson said. “My key challenge is: How do we scale this business, not just to the very large buildings but across all of the footprint?”
American Bandwidth’s senior vice president of business development, Howard Buzick echoed this sentiment, noting that Wi-Fi connectivity can address in-building coverage issues relatively quickly and is more economically viable than many customized in-building solutions for LMR or cellular systems.
“If you’re deploying a cellular solution, you have to literally deploy new equipment to make it work. Most buildings—and certainly pretty much every school building in the developed world—has a deployed Wi-Fi network already,” Buzick said. “What it comes down to is the capex problem almost completely goes away, if you can find a way to use that existing Wi-Fi network.”
But existing Wi-Fi systems often do not provide coverage to all areas where public safety needs to communicate, according to Buzick.
“As we’ve been deploying this and realizing that it’s useful for critical communications, there still are gaps,” he said. “Wi-Fi in a school is deployed in classrooms and administrative offices, but not in stairwells, parking garages and things like that. I believe there is still an opportunity to densify and harden Wi-Fi networks for this purpose.”
SBC’s Toenjes agreed that such enhancements would be needed before Wi-Fi could be viewed as a primary in-building solution for public safety.
“No one network is perfect, because everything is prone to failure at some point, so laying on Wi-Fi is fantastic,” Toenjes said. “What I want to caution against is, if we start to look at Wi-Fi as the primary connectivity methodology [for in-building wireless], then we need to look at our Wi-Fi networks differently.
“Someone earlier mentioned that Wi-Fi today is mission-critical-ready. Maybe it’s ready, but I don’t know that it’s done. If it becomes that primary connectivity path, we have to realize that our Wi-Fi networks are now a life-safety system, and that means that we need to address single points of failure, which largely [is not done] in Wi-Fi networks today. Is that Wi-Fi network connected to backup power source–like UPS or a generator—so, if there’s a power source, I don’t lose all of my communications?”
