CCWeek rewind: Industry 4.0/public safety crossover

In the second article focussing on the key sessions from Critical Communications Week, the vice president of Nokia Enterprise discusses potential connections between Industry 4.0 and public safety broadband.

The second day of Critical Communications Week witnessed a fascinating presentation given by vice president of Nokia Enterprise, Chris Johnson. The topic was how the rise of Industry 4.0 can benefit the public safety community.

He began by discussing the impact of the 9/11 terror attacks, and in particular some of the issues it threw up in relation to American public safety comms, specifically around interoperability. The upshot of this – via legislation finally passed in 2012 – was the creation of FirstNet.

With the public safety use case established, he went on to outline some the ways that private enterprise is now starting to leverage 3GPP-standardised private, ‘mission grade,’ broadband technology.

Speaking of this, he said: “It all started with public safety, but industrial players - particularly asset-intensive industries – have accelerated their Industry 4.0 journeys, powered by mission-critical private wireless networks.” Verticals mentioned during this portion of the presentation included mining, utilities, airports and more.

Johnson’s presentation finished with an exploration of how the aforementioned leveraging of ‘Industry 4.0’ might in turn benefit the public safety community. “The same mission critical use cases powered by private wireless networks across industries can be seamlessly applied to public safety needs," he said. "These include capacity, reliability and speed of the network to power mission critical services.

“The fact that more and more of these industries embrace mission critical broadband means that we are moving in the right direction, by giving more weight, marketing opportunities and power to support their specific requirements at different levels. Scale and collaboration matter.”

He finished by outlining some of the use cases and issues which could be shared by both industry and public safety in relation to the technology. Theis included mission critical applications, such as MCPTT, drones, video analytics, VR/AR and more.

“Having a greater overall market for these applications will drive virtuous investment cycles for them in the public safety community,” he said.

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Media contact

Philip Mason
Managing Editor, Critical Communications Portfolio
Tel: +44 (0)20 3874 9216
phillip.mason@markallengroup.com