Vodacom has demonstrated what it claims to be the first broadband multimedia trunking solution on a commercial LTE network in Africa.
The mobile operator says the solution makes it easier and faster for the public safety industry to communicate, and incorporates the latest multimedia functions which makes it quick to avert disaster situations.
The demo was done at Vodacom's Innovation Centre in Midrand.
Vodacom is targeting public safety services such as police, ambulance and fire services, as well as other vertical industries such as public transportation, logistics, mining, construction, air/sea/rail ports and security with the solution.
"I'm excited by what my team has done here as this is the first LTE broadband multimedia trunking demonstration in the whole of Africa," says Andries Delport, chief technology officer of Vodacom Group.
Vodacom has partnered with Huawei for the demonstration to use Huawei's LTE integrated Trunked Radio (LiTRA) application to demonstrate a broadband multimedia trunking solution which runs on Vodacom's commercial, nationwide LTE network.
According to Vodacom, the LiTRA solution also overcomes the challenges of using a public LTE network for mission-critical communication by prioritising emergency communications with a higher quality of services and also ensures encryption and security of these messages.
It notes traditional private mobile radio network technologies, such as TETRA, mainly provide basic voice trunking services such as push-to-talk (PTT) and cannot support new, innovative, high-speed data services such as video and multimedia services.
In addition, says Vodacom, these traditional private mobile radio networks are expensive to construct and maintain, the user terminals are expensive and have limited variety, and the network technology is often proprietary and inflexible.
The Huawei LiTRA application enables Vodacom's existing and entire LTE network to be leveraged to provide high bandwidth and low latency trunking capabilities to improve the performance of existing mission- and business-critical services such as PTT, but more importantly which can also support new broadband multimedia trunking services such as push to video, real-time video surveillance, high resolution photos and location-based services, the telco notes.
The LTE-based trunking service demonstrated by Vodacom is also compatible with existing consumer LTE smartphones and new rugged LTE smartphones, and does not restrict the user terminals to exclusive providers as was the case with traditional private mobile network technologies.
The broadband multimedia trunking solution demonstrated by Vodacom and Huawei is compliant with 3GPP standards, and is easy and quick for Vodacom to deploy across its entire and existing LTE network which currently provides coverage to 75.9% of the total South African population and which is the widest LTE network coverage in SA.
Share