Redefining Readiness: The Crucial Role of Wireless Tech in Public Safety

Craig: Unfortunately, it seems like we're dealing with these disasters more and more often every year, both man-made and natural. But, you know, technology plays a very integral part in that. And look at emerging technology. Let's talk drones. Not only drones for the agencies to use, to fly around an area that may be hard to get to any other way besides that, but also T-Mobile tethering drones.

We now have drones that we can tether connectivity to areas where there is none, based on how that connectivity works. And not only that, but one of the things I look at as far as emerging technology, and utilizing, 4G versus 5G — even though I'm going to talk about it as emerging technology — it's a little bit old school, and that's push-to-talk. For all the cops in the room, we all remember the push-to-talk Nextel days. You know, I remember being undercover. At that time, we had the Nextel push-to-talks, and they were amazing. We loved them. And then it kind of went away, but that's coming back. And so, not only push-to-talk on a cell phone and a smartphone, but also push-to-talk on a standalone device. And what those allow you to do, agencies, in an event where you're getting all sorts of different state, local, and federal agencies coming on, seeing that interoperability is the one thing that's very hard to figure out. And now you can just pass out a bunch of push-to-talk handsets, and as they come on scene, "Here you go," or have them download the push-to-talk app, and give them those kind of things.

So, drones, push-to-talk, those are all being utilized. And then, when it comes to disaster response, we obviously have our SatCOLTs, COWs, things like that, the deployable assets that we do as well.

Now, we may not have intended on this when the question was asked, but one thing I did want to talk about when it comes to emerging technologies is what wireless carriers can do from a network optimization perspective, and I'm going to give you a super-quick for instance.

During the unfortunate shooting that happened last year up in Maine, I was actually in Boston at the time, about an hour and a half away when it occurred. And without even being asked, no agencies contacted us right after. Right, this is still going, but it hit the national news.

Our network teams were sitting at their laptops or their computers at home, or their home office, and they were optimizing the network. What that means is they looked at where the crime scene was. They looked at where the hospital was. They looked at where the reunification center was, and they optimized the network in that area. Meaning, tilted some antennas, turned up some dials, so that any surge event in that area, the network would be able to handle. So, that's one emerging technology is how quick and nimble networks can be optimized, especially ours.

Greg: Obviously, wireless connectivity is proliferated everywhere, which is great. You know, we work a lot with IoT, from smart refrigerators to even medical equipment that needs temperature monitoring, which is great. But as technology's evolved, we build purpose-built products. One of the big things I see is, believe it or not, some of these RFPs that require this ultra level of security and redundancy. And —I get it — small agencies have tight budgets; I'll see a Mi-Fi, a consumer-grade Mi-Fi in their cup holder. That will give you connectivity, of course. But it's not purpose-built. And so, what routers really do is they're purpose-built, so we optimize it for their environment, in-vehicle. You know, most police agencies, it's heavy-duty cycles, always on, always connected. You know, the good thing is the vehicle will stay connected. You can program them to stay on when you shut off the ignition, to maintain that connection, so when officer's out of the vehicle, there's still a connection. There are still systems in the vehicle that can be operating.

As mentioned, they have these are mobile computers. They're really advanced computers, with high processing power, so they can be doing a lot of things to maintain the connections in the background, or maintain security, so officers don't have to think about that or re-log in. So, that's one of the big advantages I see.

And then, of course, from a wireless perspective, the dedicated roof-mounted antennas, with higher gain, really give you that extra performance. Sometimes, a ruggedized laptop is on the dash, or really close to the windshield, so you can get connectivity, but, really, the vehicle's almost its own solution, and having all that technology operate homogeneously, is where a dedicated router is sort of the centralized point to manage all that.

For your IT teams, or people that understand technology, it's easy to program, and set it up to do different modes, as mentioned, in-depot, through a geofence. Out on the beat, it can behave very differently, so IT needs to automate things, to simplify things for officers. It's exciting. I've been working in this domain for over 20 years, as I mentioned, and before, it was just simple connectivity, and now, it's really amazing the technology that can happen sort of automatically.

Craig: You know, and if I may add on to what Greg was saying about the routers, I come from an agency that we had routers in our patrol cars, and a lot of the times, agencies are not able to afford that. And I'm, now, also, working at T-Mobile and understanding how these things work, the routers just bring, you know, he mentioned the rooftop-mounted antennas that gives you a little more reach-out-and-touch-somebody type of coverage, but the dual-SIM, dual-radio option, where you can run two carriers simultaneously, and that router automatically grabs the strongest carrier in whatever area you're in, that's, I mean, that's pretty forward-thinking when it comes to being very redundant. And just the throughput you get through a router with your speeds, and how you can maintain those speeds, up and down, and the low latency, I think is just a difference-maker as well.

And, you know, conversations I have with chiefs all the time, they're like… and I won't call out any one ruggedized laptop or laptop maker… but they're like, "Oh, yeah. We run SIMs in our laptops." I'm like, "Well, that's, you know, based on what laptops you're using, did you know that's 4G technology?" And, you know, does it support all of the network that you're running in there? Meaning, you know, T-Mobile's network is not one band. It's not one offering. You know, there's mid, high, and low bands. And so, we want to make sure that those laptops support all of those bands, and that's something we can very seamlessly do with these Digi routers, especially with the 5G ones, right?

So, couple things you want to think about is, whether you’re using outdated technology by looking at something that might be somewhat cheaper, but it's not going to save anybody any time. You know, and in our business, we all know that time matters in the policing and fire business. Anytime you can get data faster, more secure, it's actually going to be the possibility of saving some lives.

Greg: And I would say, as video's proliferated, and I've worked with companies that leverage a lot of video cameras, and it's great technology, and some of the analytics is amazing to me nowadays. But the latency's important, and then also managing it. You know, we work with a lot of companies that have DVRs in vehicles. How do you manage that data? Because there's that really important part of the data, but then there's a lot of data you collect. Some agencies like to archive that. Some agencies don't.

So, between the real-time views, that pushes the latency and the performance of the connected network, to just managing heavy data files from video, either DVR offloading or camera offloading, we've worked a lot to optimize not only automation, so that the people that are driving the vehicles, the officers don't have to worry about it, to really trying to optimize the throughput. You know, some of our TX, higher-end TX lines have 4x4 MIMO Wi-Fi, to really offload a lot of data quickly. And again, that's where some of these newer technologies are great. As that's going to continue to grow and proliferate. They're being built to future-proof you for those kinds of use cases.

Craig: Yeah. That's a great question. When you talk about industries, and let's talk about 5G for instance, everyone knows, everyone's seen the Super Bowl marketing commercial with T-Mobile and the 5G network, and I can honestly say we're the only one with a standalone 5G core, meaning you don't have to go through 4G to get to 5G. And then, you know, if you look at T-Mobile's network now, with the Sprint merger, our 5G core's bigger than the other two combined. And so, 5G is really the play where it's at, no matter what segment you're in. We have teams in public safety, we have teams in education, we have teams in oil and gas, and transportation. So, that's the thing that kind of makes the difference, is we have that network bandwidth, or capacity, to really handle all these different things, and do some really cool things when it comes to 5G. I mean, the sky's the limit when it comes to these networks and what they can do with the speeds and capacity that they have.