Just curious, why are ptt networks less infrastructure heavy?
That's often walkie talkies, no? Those are pretty handy in first responder situations.
Nation wide networks used in Netherlands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P2000_(network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Trunked_Radio#cite...
P2000 is basically to receive a text. The C2000/TTR is encrypted, meant for Policy/Ambulance/Fire departments and apparently used by many countries in the world. It'll work even when other networks are down. Apparently fully used since 2007.
I'm a first responder for my building, it used to be that the C2000 system (simply stated: "professional walkie walkies") would be difficult to use in my building (couldn't go through concrete). We'd lend them our walkie talkies (they work much better as we have a support transmitter within the building). Over the last few years they seem to have improved C2000, nowadays they don't need ours for most areas.
The various problems with the C2000 system are explained in Dutch (!) at https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/C2000#Problemen.
- Connectivity can be lost when entering a building (e.g. by firemen). For this reason, direct analogue radio connections are often used.
- The system can't handle the load during large calamities.
The ministry of home affairs is investigating.
For a system that's supposed to be used during one I'd say that's a rather large problem.
I'm working on a state wide radio system for a power company, its a simulcast network, with 20 talkpaths. Your worse case bandwidth utilization is on the order of roughly 1.5 megabit a second per site (realistically, its much lower). In addition, if a site fails the other ones will still function, also, if the network core fails, the sites go into a failsoft mode, which allows single site communications to still occur.
There a protocol extensions for public safety on top of MCPTT. To better handle out of coverage situation (D2D or ProSe, which is device-to-device communication with relay support too), to hook custom applications on the network side, etc. But the infra is LTE, so at least it leverages an existing technology. Still, with some additions on top to better support public safety use cases.
And the "obsolete" part is not very convincing. Yes, there's a lot of hype about 5G but LTE will be long lived and perfectly fine for such an application for a long time. I can't comment on the overall efficiency of the FirstNet program, but the idea of leveraging LTE instead of rolling a custom tech or keeping using old and inefficient ones seems sound to me.
The FirstNet is/should be unrelated, as far as I'm aware. I think it's supposed to be for data applications like image and document sharing.