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Opening up Lines of Communication for First Responders
 The Columbine shootings, 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing. Besides being the epicenters of horrific events, each of these had one other thing in common: a crippling lack of communications interoperability among the various public safety agencies responding to the events.
On September 11, for example, fire fighters and police officers relied on disparate radio systems that didn’t allow them to communicate with one another—resulting in fire fighters not receiving the same warning as other first responders that the World Trade Center towers were about to collapse.
Project 25 (P25) was developed to reduce the chances of these types of problems occurring. It was established by the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials International (APCO), the National Association of State Telecommunications Directors (NASTD), and the U.S. government’s National Communications System (NCS), which partnered with the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) to develop a suite of communication standards for digital public safety radio communications equipment. The number of standards covered by Project 25 is extensive, but all are associated with the interfaces that support communications between the various components that can comprise a land mobile radio system, such as mobile and portable radios, fixed station devices, and consoles.
P25 is not a new activity—in fact, it was first started in the late 1980s. And while progress has been made in developing standards to support compatibility, the findings that communication systems interoperability led to such tragic consequences on 9/11 has greatly spurred interest in the initiative.
“Certainly 9/11 created a lot of impetus for users to upgrade systems, to standardize systems, to be able to look to better interoperability,” says John Oblak, chair of TIA TR-8, the committee responsible for facilitating the development of P25 standards.
In particular, 9/11 helped foster interest in developing standards for other interfaces beyond the common air interface, which, until recently, received most of the committee’s attention.
“A lot of the standards that have been written in the past have been written around the air interface and services that apply over the air. That includes trunk operation, it includes all the aspects of security and encryption, it includes the technology used for voice coding and decoding, and all of those types of things. Any many of those standards have been out for five to 10 years and certainly Project 25 radios and systems have been out for the better part of ten years,” says Oblak.
But in order to enable true interoperability, there needs to be standardized specifications for other types of interfaces. That’s why there are so many interfaces covered by Project 25 specifications.
Oblak lists the different interfaces: “There’s the over-the-air interface, and that’s the interface between a radio and a fixed station. There is a data peripheral interface between a radio and a data terminal. That’s on the user side. Then on the fixed side, there’s a radio network, and it has interfaces to the public switched telephone network (PSTN); there’s an interface with a host computer that’s hosting a data network; there’s an interface between other radio subsystems—we call that the inter-RF subsystem interface or ISSI; there are interfaces to consoles; and there are interfaces to network management for the radio system.
“So Project 25 is kind of a conglomeration of standards for all of these interfaces,” Oblak continues. “A lot of the work that’s happened over the last couple years has been involved with these network standards, in particular the inter-RF subsystem interface, the console subsystem interface, and the fixed station subsystem interface. Each of those is an IP-based interfaces and deals with the interface between one subsystem and another.”
In March, support for greater compatibility between other systems and consoles used for responding to emergency calls was realized with the release of TIA 102.BAGA, Project 25 Console Subsystem Interface Overview.
“The console interface allows different consoles to communicate with radio systems. So a public safety entity—a municipality or a state—can buy a radio system and then can go out and buy a console system and this interface ensures that the two can talk to each other. The console interface is an import interface, it’s the thing that lets agencies buy a radio system and interconnect it with the brand of console that they choose to buy,” Oblak says.
Oblak expects the committee will be publishing a number of other standards soon. In addition, a new subcommittee is working on developing standards associated with P25 compliance testing.
All this work will make a big difference, says Oblak. “Project 25 gives you interoperability between manufacturers, between one jurisdiction and another jurisdiction, it allows for multiple purchases from multiple vendors. The whole idea behind the interface standards is that you can have a variety of manufacturers to purchase from and they all interoperate.”
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