Project 25: Helping to Ensure Land Mobile Interoperability

The purpose of this SAFECOM position paper is to encourage public safety agencies to source and deploy digital (P25) standards compliant land (LMR) systems and equipment to ensure optimal compatibility and interoperability.

The use of disparate communications technologies within the public safety community has been cited as a problem in virtually every major emergency response in recent history. The advent and deployment of modern LMR technologies exacerbated the problem, as the initial systems deployed with proprietary technologies that hampered interoperable communications. Understanding these challenges, the public safety and vendor communities established a collaborative coalition to develop P25—a suite of digital, public safety radio communications standards for first responders and emergency communications professionals. At the same time, the public safety community has worked diligently to educate regulatory and legislative bodies about the technical barriers that inhibit interoperable communications. P25 standards define the functionality and performance necessary to enable and implement communications systems. Public safety agencies in the United States and Canada have adopted and widely implemented P25, published as the Telecommunications Industry Association’s 102 (TIA-102) series on Land Mobile Communications Standards. In fact, P25 standard-based equipment is strongly encouraged if spending Federal grant dollars to purchase public safety LMR equipment.

P25 is not the only digital LMR standards-based equipment available today. Similar digital LMR technologies, such as Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA)1 and (DMR)2, are widely used outside of the U.S. and hold the dominant market positions in other parts of the world. Recently, some municipal governments and other related stakeholders in the U.S. have opted to deploy TETRA, DMR, or other disparate technologies which are incompatible with P25 standards- based systems and equipment. Not only does this pose a technical hurdle for successful interoperability, it potentially negates billions of dollars’ worth of investment in P25 LMR systems. Additional deployment of non-compatible, non-standard systems and technologies also has the potential to undermine efforts put toward refining interoperable communications capabilities through years of operational procedure, policy development, and training and exercises.

The use of incompatible equipment will create barriers to achieving interoperability and therefore increase risk to our first responders and the public they serve SAFECOM strongly urges public safety agencies, and other emergency response entities contemplating the purchase or usage of LMR equipment, to select and implement P25 standards compliant equipment. No other available technological solution ensures compatibility and provides critical digital communications interoperability with established P25 standards compliant solutions. While there are many other elements to consider in one’s mission to achieve a high-level of interoperability, there can be no argument that compatible technology is critical. Thus, SAFECOM strongly supports standards-based technologies that improve interoperability for our nation’s first responders and recommends that public safety stakeholders use Federal grant funds for the purchase of P25 technologies.

1 TETRA is the European Telecom Standards Institute (ETSI) standard for digital trunked radio communications and is in use primarily overseas and in Europe. 2 DMR was developed by ETSI in 2005 to address a need in the European Union for an affordable, low-complexity digital radio. While DMR is primarily used outside of the US, smaller agencies within the US are starting to implement DMR solutions.

May 2014