Progress being made in addressing interoperability requirements for PPDR

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) will hold high-level discussions in Quebec City later this month to hammer out details of interoperability requirements needed in public safety radiocommunications. Discussions within the CACP’s Informatics Committee are expected to help map out the route to delivering interoperable and standardized public safety communications in Canada. Translating law enforcement agencies’ and public safety groups’ requirements into radio standards has been a challenge, according to many who attended the National Public Safety Radiocommunications Conference in Ottawa last month (RoW, April 3/02). Although no real progress was made on the actual requirements, a major step was taken to ensure that they be completed in a timely manner. On the second day of the conference, headway was made into coming to terms with what requirements work is actually being done. Ted Campbell, executive director of the Radio Advisory Board of Canada (RABC), says the CACP Informatics Committee has already begun to write some interoperability requirements. "It seems to me that one of the conclusions that we did draw on the second day was that it isn’t a vacant lot out there and in fact there are other people doing requirements work," he tells Report on Wireless. "And they’re writing them correctly at the top level for command and control systems. They’re focusing on the complete system – communications, procedures, everything." Results from the CACP discussions this month will be discussed at a conference in Saskatoon later this year. Law enforcement agencies, public safety groups, government officials, and the RABC will congregate at the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials of Canada (APCO Canada) in October to discuss in greater detail the requirements issue. "I hope that between now and late summer, we will be able to isolate some of the key interoperability issues and secure some level of agreement from players in the public safety domain, so we can go to Saskatoon and actually make some progress on some standards issues," Campbell says. "Hopefully, we’ll get a little closer to understanding what the requirements are." Reaching consensus on interoperability and standards requirements by this fall may be a lofty goal. But Campbell is confident that there will be a better understanding of the requirements, and he stresses that there are many requirements, not just one. "It’s a matrix in which systems overlap systems," he says. "(There’s) municipal systems, provincial systems, federal systems, and American systems, (and within each one) there’s police, fire, ambulance." Progress made at the conference Campbell says that a meeting of the minds between the CACP Informatics Committee and the RABC was a major step in the right direction. While both groups agreed to look at interoperability requirements in the medium- and long-term, they also agreed to do a better job at communicating. Part of the problem, Campbell explains, "is not that the public safety guys don’t understand what they need, it is that we have not yet figured out what they are telling us. "And this requires us to work with the public safety guys to make sure we understand what needs they are expressing and how they are expressing them. So it isn’t really a question of them developing their needs, it’s a question of the radiocommunications community understanding what the public safety guys are telling us." Considerable work still remains to be done While progress was made on the second day of the conference, a considerable amount of work remains to be able to come to some level of consensus among the various levels of government and the multitude of public safety groups. On the domestic scene, preparing requirements for interoperable and standardized public safety radiocommunications is a daunting task, but in the international arena it is that much more complicated. At the World Radiocommunication Conference in Caracas, Venezuela next year (WRC-03), there is a specific item dealing with identifying a global spectrum band for public safety activities. But getting the Canadian position together has proved to be a lot more difficult than previously anticipated. "Getting the information, getting the requirements out of the public safety community has been a chore, and that’s one of the reasons we had the conference," Campbell states. Eldon Amoroso, senior director of the information and technology branch of the London Police Service, noted on the first day of the conference that there are thousands of agencies, each having its own budget, schedule, and list of priorities. None of these groups seems to be willing to sacrifice any of its independence for the greater good, he added. Campbell points out that in this light, it’s not the job of the federal government to take the reins. While the chiefs of police seem to be doing their bit in terms of interoperability and standards requirements, it’s unclear what the other public safety groups, such as the ambulance and fire services agencies, are doing. "The key players here are the cities and the municipalities. They’re the ones with the biggest problem because they’ve got most of the public safety POP issues and most of the crime," he says. "If there is going to be a terrorist attack, it’s going to happen in downtown Toronto probably, so it’s Mel Lastman’s job, not Jean Chrétien’s."

Progress being made in addressing interoperability requirements for PPDR

News | April 16, 2002

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