James Pearce, TelecomTV (00:05):
I'm delighted to be joined today by Veronica Sanchez-Vega, who's going to be talking to us about mission-critical networks. Veronica, over to you.

Veronica Sanchez-Vega, Ericsson (00:12):
Yes. So this is a very exciting area because it allows for new revenue for CSPs, for telco service providers. It's about the next-generation mission-critical that will provide ubiquitous, always-on, and highly resilient services for governments to modernise their critical infrastructure, attend public emergencies, and support military interventions. So right now, the situation is that all these verticals of mission-critical, they have existing solutions. They are narrowband, and they have been serving the purpose for many years. But now they are obsolete to address the increasing challenges and upcoming crises. So there is a big investment happening right now on these governments and also some private entities to modernise their network. And this becomes a very good opportunity. It's a high-value vertical for CSPs to collaborate with these mission-critical customers.

(01:17):
So what we're going to see today is we are going to be placed in a real wildfire scenario where we have the firefighters and police. Now, they need to address these next-generation fires, and we see how 5G technology allows us to protect what matters the most — that is, saving lives.

(01:34):
So the first use case, if we get into: we are in this big forest where we have placed sensors. We are leveraging IoT technology and sensors all over, so a small fire can be detected really early, and we can do that with 5G Standalone using RedCap devices, for example. It could also be done with 4G narrowband CAT-M type of devices, but it is more optimised. Of course, one value of 5G technology is that it is secure. Now, all the protocols are encrypted, secure by design, so this is very important for all these operators.

(02:17):
So if we move next, after the fire, and this is showing in the central command centre of the public safety agency. The next one, normally in the current networks, it would be the humans that go directly as the first responder. But in this case, we can leverage drones as first-time responders that reach faster, and they can also be equipped with video to provide situational awareness that can be fed back to the agencies to do a more targeted and better actuation. So for that, the drone operation requires low latency. There is also a video that can be rendered with AI; it could even be improved with predictive models to analyse the fire spread. And we can couple that with, of course, 5G slicing, but also we could even have edge computing. We have a local UPF with an AI application here to provide the best-in-class quality of experience for these drones. So the video here you see is rendered to the general command centre.

(03:26):
And the next step is to warn the public. There might be people inside this fire, so we can, again, leverage 5G technology. Of course, all these forests are provided with macro coverage. These users inside, they have their cell phones. So we can have an application that leverages network exposure from the different operators and location in this network from the public safety agency that provides geofencing. So we can retrieve what are the IMSI that are within the area and send customized alerts. And these customized alerts can even be coupled with a drone to predict what are the safe itineraries. Now, if we think about the recent wildfires, for example, here in Europe — recently, for example, in Portugal — many people were able to be alerted, but they took the wrong itinerary, because these are next-generation fires, very difficult to predict. So this is a really high-value use case for public safety. And then, of course, the sensors and the video will keep feeding the public agency staff to opt in and out, also predicting how the fire will spread.

(04:42):
And the last use case is also of high value: we can have all the different public agency departments connected to the same network, to the same backbone in different APS, having their own applications and have a general command centre. We can leverage not only push-to-talk type of services, but also the regular IMS voice group call and eMBMS services that we have today in telco networks, which are of high value for all these different departments to coordinate their action. This is now not possible because each department has totally different, siloed solutions, and they don't interoperate. So here we have a 3GPP network that is a standard, and we have a single network with different types of applications built on top.

(05:32):
And the last one is, of course, we rely on coverage, but of course, base stations can be compromised — for example, by fire. This, of course, is displayed in the public safety command centre where there is an interface to the network management system with all the alarms and so on. So we can see here how they see now the base station is compromised. And then now we can send mobile radio units either by trucks or even by drones. We have the Ericsson Radio Access Network also evolving to provide all these special types of RAN solutions.

(06:11):
So this is for the demo and the use case. I want to share a little bit on the Ericsson portfolio. At Ericsson, we have been working on mission-critical and we have references for more than a decade, and we are keeping evolving both our radio and core network portfolio, working with the overall ecosystem partners, achieving certifications with all these applications and devices. And now we are evolving our core network.

(06:37):
So we have the 5G core portfolio, and we are providing to the operators and also to these verticals solutions that are carrier-grade, based on our existing 5G core dual-mode portfolio, but industrialised. So they have a low cost to deploy and a low cost to maintain. We have to keep in mind that these customers, they are working, for example, with the TETRA system; they don't touch their system for a long time. So they need solutions that are easy to maintain and also a long-term partner to work with.

(07:16):
So we have this integrated core solution that is a reference solution based on existing products. We have all the different functions from the core network that are needed for this advanced use case. It is our single stack, cloud-native solution, and we have many automation tools built on top. And for the same equivalent scope of a project that is using product by product from the portfolio, now with this solution, we are able to reduce by half the cost, for example, to deploy and also for the lifecycle. It is highly resilient, with zero redundancy that is needed by these customers.

(07:56):
And of course, just to end, very important, it provides also the deployment flexibility that is needed because we need to keep in mind this is a very different market. And one key aspect to consider at the beginning when engaging with the public sector and these types of companies for a CSP is to understand the go-to-market model and the needs from these companies. There are some verticals — and of course, this is for any vertical: public safety, defence, utilities, rail, or the digital space — they might want a dedicated network with their own RAN. But we see more and more interest and an increase to have what we call hybrid networks, where they can partner with a CSP and leverage their existing coverage. It can be like roaming, MVNO, or even shared RAN, so it really depends on their needs. This core network solution allows to support any of these models.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (08:54):
Well, thank you so much. That's really fascinating. Thank you.