Samsung extends its LTE offering to Public Safety Era

Samsung announced the launch of its Public Safety solution based on LTE technology (PS-LTE). LTE allows for efficient, cost-effective data and multimedia delivery, and is intended to be both upgradeable and extendable, thus making it a prime candidate for operating the next generation of public safety networks.

“We have established ourselves as an innovator in the commercial LTE market and now seek to expand our strong LTE offerings into public safety,” said Youngky Kim, President and Head of Networks Business at Samsung Electronics. “Pushing the boundaries of telecommunication technology to bring about improvements to the quality of life and the social well-being of people around the world has always been an important goal for Samsung. Our Public Safety solution will enable vastly improved coordination for first responders, improving emergency situations.”

Samsung’s offerings include a Push-To-Talk (PTT) service and PTT client application for devices, evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS), IMS, EPC and eNB. Each of these components is based on the 3GPP Release 12 standard—a first for a solution of its kind, with existing solutions typically being proprietary in nature.

Samsung’s comprehensive PS-LTE solution places primary emphasis on stability and built-in redundancies to ensure the maximum performance and reliability necessary to exceed expectations in tense and time-critical situations.

As an extended component of its PS-LTE solution, Samsung is also developing a dedicated railway and subway security and operations solution, Railway LTE. Based on the same platform as the PS-LTE solution, Railway LTE will enable operators, transport infrastructure firms and governments the ability to greatly improve their ability to cost-effectively and directly maintain safe operation and coordination of rail traffic.

Samsung is currently under discussion to deploy its PS-LTE solution, which will be commercially available in Q3 2015.

As the leading contributor to the 3GPP PS-LTE, Samsung supported the standardization of device-to-device (D2D) and Group Communication System Enabler for LTE (GCSELTE) specifications in Release 12. These efforts received additional and considerable support from the Korean government, the Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA) and major operators within Korea.

With the Release 13 specification, Samsung aims to further cement its leadership with Mission Critical Push-to-Talk (MCPTT) and Isolated E-UTRAN Operation for Public Safety(IOPS) standardization.

The Korean government plans to launch the initial PS-LTE network in Gangwon province in 4Q 2015 and will expand to additional major cities by 2016 in order to support the operations of more than 320 government departments and agencies.