September – Monthly reading: LMR is still king
Every month I read a huge amount of business, trade and financial press, as well as reading whitepapers, product brochures, reports, and attending various webinars and events.
I thought you might enjoy a brief, possibly irrelevant, monthly shortcut to some of the best I come across.
What caught my eye this month
In a flash of the eye it is the end of September already! But the good news is that Omdia’s Emerging Critical Tech & Innovation Survey is due to publish shortly! We ran this survey in early 2024, in partnership with IWCE, and gathered insights from both the end-user and vendor communities. ?
I wanted to share some of the interesting highlights that caught my eye here though.
So let’s talk about what’s actually moving the needle right now: 5G, AI, IoT. But we all know that LMR is still holding down the fort. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon. LMR is still king. It’s the tried-and-true foundation for mission-critical operations. Roughly 90% of respondents said it’s still “critical” to their daily operations.
But 5G and IoT are gaining ground. The survey found that end users are increasingly interested in these technologies, especially for video analytics and connected devices.
The other element that jumped out to me was the classic tale between end-user budget constrains versus vendor optimism. The survey showed that end user budgets are increasing, but that vendors are setting their sales targets even higher.
We often talk about bridging the gap between the LMR and broadband transition, but there is a gap to be bridged between end-user budgets and vendor expectations I think too!
The road ahead
Connected vehicles and drones also look to be becoming regular tools as part of the emergency response arsenal. However, the scale of these differs greatly. If we’re talking connected vehicles we are talking tens of thousands, if we’re talking drones, we may only be talking in the thousands. A neat example of this, at least from today’s deployment levels, is that UK police forces have only ~200 drones deployed, but operate more than 30,000 cars, vans and motorcycles.
AI and IoT are also both technologies that look to be in the next adoption wave, moving from “evaluation” to “integration”. The survey highlighted that more organizations will shift from simply piloting AI and IoT to fully integrating them into their everyday operations.
Look out for the next Crit Comms Circle podcast on the topic of operationally effective AI – I speak with an industry leader in the field of AI powered noise-reduction, which can isolate human speech from loud environments—ensuring that critical messages are heard, understood, and acted upon without delay. It looks like there is much more potential in the future for this type of operationally useful AI
Anyways, on to the links!
From Omdia
In the news
领英推荐
Satellite mini-special
Whitepapers
?? FRMCS-Transition starts laying the tracks toward a sustainable and intelligent future (informa.com)
Podcasts
Macro trends
??OpenAI To Restructure As For-profit Benefit Corporation, Targets $150 Bn Valuation (businessworld.in)
Events
??? Summit | PMRExpo
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