Merry Christmas and a happy new year 2020

Christmas thoughts

The year is coming to end and it is time to sum up what has happended during the past months whilst taking a look to the new decade that is right at our door step.

What did 2019 bring in Finland?

In Finland the subscriber number in Erillisverkot operated VIRVE network continue to grow, national railways have taken the TETRA based network into fully use and also other critical communications sectors see it as a convenient possibility to jump into the bandwagon leading to critical broadband.

On the broadband side in Spring new legislation came into force defining Erillisverkot as the service operator for critical boradband service- Virve 2.0. Granting pre-emptive priority in the preferred MNOs RAN on all frequencies as well as mandating support for national roaming. Yesterday – 17th December the government gave a go ahead to proceed with Virve 2 core network and RAN service procurement marking a major milestone in project phase 1. Just couple weeks earlier an RFI on Mission Critical Services was launched. This cover 3gpp compliant Mission Critical Push to Talk (MCPTT), Mission Critical Video (MCVideo) and Mission Critical Data (MCData) services.

What will the next decade bring?

Looking into the next decade years of change, development exciting new innovations lie ahead of us. For way over first half practical solutions that enable parallel use and migration between narrow band TETRA and broadband LTE/5G are a key incredient of critical communications day-to-day operations. Advanced situational awareness solutions such as video shift users increasingly to information centric operations. Significant success factor will be how new services are designed and daily operations evolved to fully harvest the capabilities of increased data transmission.

With these thoughts we wish you all Merry Christmas and a happy new year and of course #SuccessInCooperation