BES police get new communication tool

The Caribbean Netherlands Police Corps completed its trial of a hosted turnkey solution by Motorola Solutions in collaboration with their partner Critical Communication Caribbean (C3) that provides access to public safety mobile applica­tions.

“Inhabitants of Bonaire, Saba and St. Eustatius (BES) have benefited from this suite of public safety applications used by more than 30 police officers,” stated a company release.

Intelligent Communications as a Service is designed for public safety and emergency response teams who need specialised public safety com­munications over broadband networks, using purpose-built and traditional smart devices. LEX L10 is the public safety LTE handheld device select­ed by this public safety force to get the services that rely on secure and interoperable­capable voice, messaging, mapping and whiteboarding group communications

According to the release, the tests proved real benefits for the force’s mission-critical communications. It added that this service model has given the public force ac­cess to public safety mobile applications that are easy to deploy, so they can respond more effectively to the needs of the community.

“We started the trial seven months ago and within this very short period of time we have witnessed the good im­pact of Motorola Solutions’ Intelligent Communications as a Service for our mission. Without the need for an ini­tial capital investment on servers and data centres, this model allowed us to have al­ways up to date public safety solutions, ready to provide intelligence in real time by accessing and sharing critical information in an extremely secure way, over existing broadband networks,” said officer Baker of Saba.

The supplier says its public safety mobile applications are a highly effective way to share critical intelligence data among officers in the field and personnel at the command centre. They work across different networks and devices, enabling real-time communication and collabo­ration that can accelerate time to resolution.

The service package in­cluded mobile apps such as Broadband PTT, Motorola Solutions’ broadband push-­to-talk (PTT) solution that lets Smartphone users se­curely communicate with a simple press of a button.

In addition to enabling groups of smartphone users to easily communicate with one another, this application can provide a PTT bridge with the land mobile radios police use today, enabling teams to communicate using push-to-talk across networks and devices mapping, which enables location-based col­laboration by showing nearby officers and quickly creating “geo-fenced” voice- or text-based communication groups with officers in the vicinity. It allows an officer to talk to an­other officer one block away — even if he doesn’t know the officer’s name.

It also offers messaging, which lets first responders securely share text messages and photos with individuals or talk groups across smart-phones, enabling faster com­munication and collabora­tion. For example, messaging enables a user to send a pho­to to a voice talk group.

Another option is white-boarding, which enables in-field, interactive media-based collaboration and in­formation-sharing. It allows officers to graphically share operations, response plans and areas of interest through drawings on a shared map on their devices.

This service ran on the Mo­torola Solutions LEX L10 ­public safety LTE handheld device and 30 such devices are being used by police of the Caribbean Netherlands. “Device and services have been integrated so they were able to work together and strengthen their connected capabilities, generating quick interactions among them,” concluded the release.

The Daily Herald.