Feasibility of long term evolution (LTE) as technology for public safety

Being that current Professional Mobile Radio systems, such as TETRA, APCO25 or DMR suffer from slow data transfer, LTE technology is taking its place as the choice for public safety broadband communication system. Declared performance in terms of capacity, reliability and security is enough to fulfill the strict requirements of the public safety users. Quality of Service concept in LTE, with Allocation and Retention Priority, Quality Class Identifier, Traffic Flow Templates with addition of access classes is the solid ground for deployment of LTE as the solution for public safety broadband data transfer. The expectation, sourcing from the author´s experience in planning and deployment of public safety communication systems, is that, with additional efforts of 3GPP in definition of concepts to support the fallback schemes, group calls and enhanced security, and with careful particular system planning - which is the task for both network operators and special users, LTE may continue to be the choice for public safety data transfer, and the future solution for voice communication as well.