TCCA or The Critical Communications Association has been on the forefront of driving innovation and bringing the industry together, when it comes to critical communications segment. Whether it is critical industries from public safety, government, civil defence, resource, mining, energy and other professional user sectors – TCCA has played a vital role as a torchbearer and as a guiding force towards growth.   

As part of our Spotlight on Critical communications, Kevin Graham, TCCA, CEO speaks with Zia Askari from TelecomDive.com about how TCCA is focusing its efforts on India and how is the association looking at trends for this segment in the year 2025.

What are some of the big priorities for TCCA today?

TCCA released our 2024-2028 Strategy, and the Vision and Mission will continue to revolve around three principal objectives that will guide the endeavours of our members. Our critical communications community exists to serve critical communications users that span critical industries from public safety, government, civil defence, transport, essential utilities, resource, mining, energy and other professional user sectors

Our Vision 

Advancing global critical communications for a safer, more connected world. 
Our Mission 

Principal Objectives 

1. Advocate the importance of critical communications, and its vital role within societies and economies.

2. Enable successful deployment, operation and evolution of mission-critical end-to-end systems and services. 

3. Strengthen the ecosystem and range of critical communication solutions through global market harmonisation.

Our key priorities are to facilitate information exchange across all the stakeholders at a local, regional, and global level. To continue to understand current and future end user requirements, advocate to government on policy and regulation, including spectrum access, and standards evolution to support the development and deployment of solutions that meet critical operational needs. 

Our global community is vital to safer societies yet is only a small fraction of the global telecoms market. It is therefore important we strive to aggregate demand across all sectors and geographies to create scale to sustain the ongoing evolution of the necessary end-to-end ecosystem and ensure secure trusted multivendor interoperable solutions are available when and where users need them in all operational scenarios.
 
TCCA jointly with our members and partners participates in 3GPP standardisation to drive critical communication sector interest and ensure the standards support sector use cases. Our Working Groups such as CCBG (Critical Communications Broadband Group) and LRWG (Legal and Regulatory Working Group) actively address topics arising within the membership producing studies and guidelines. The Broadband Industry Group (BIG) and TETRA Industry Group (TIG) provide the engine for driving the broadband and narrowband solutions, providing guidance into standards and interoperability, and bring together expert guidance on technical capability and future innovation possibilities. 

Our partnering with standards organisations, vertical critical communications sector associations and regional associations such as the Broadband India Forum, enable a much broader and deeper mutual cooperation and sharing of knowledge and expertise. Our longstanding partnering with ETSI Plugtesting and now Global Certification Forum is another vital way we are driving a path for certification, conformance interoperability and field trials of 3GPP MCX broadband solutions as we have successfully done with our narrowband TETRA interoperability program for more than 25 years.

How do you look at the emerging trends for Critical Communications globally?

For decades critical communications users have been reliant on closed, private or shared narrowband technologies and will continue to do so for many years to come. Just as society and consumers have become reliant on fixed and wireless broadband, our critical communications community needs access to reliable and secure broadband that can deliver vital operational voice, data and video services beyond what is possible on narrowband networks alone. 

The trend globally is to at least augment narrowband with 3GPP standards-based MCX terrestrial broadband, and non-terrestrial broadband where terrestrial networks may not be economically viable. It is clear a mix of technologies and deployment models will be required to satisfy operational needs and functionality. Hybrid connectivity and interworking will become an important consideration as will the range of network deployment options from private, government, public mobile and satellite operators along with rapid deployment and off-network and edge solutions. 

How do you look at India as a market for Critical Communications segment? What role can TCCA play here?

As a nation with a significant population, large landmass and coastal territory India is obviously an important market on an international scale. Delivering critical industry communications capability to a nation of such size is immense, as it is in delivering connectivity to its citizens. India has the potential to add significant aggregated demand and important scale to the global demand import for the reasons mentioned earlier. 

It is therefore vital that Indian government and Indian critical industries collaborate with global peers who are currently or actively planning their national strategies for critical communication capability. This will ensure India can leverage international knowledge, develop local industry capability and contribute knowledge and solutions aligned with nations already cooperating towards evolving harmonised standards-based service delivery. 

TCCA is fortunate to have global membership actively cooperating towards such common goals and is therefore one important resource that India can use to assist in charting its national and professional industry sector capability and policies. I see TCCA as a vehicle to bring international best practice to India and equally ensure Indian capability can be shared internationally.

What kind of challenges do you see in this space today and how can the industry look at overcoming these challenges? 

As mission critical communication moves from voice-centric towards information-centric operation this opens enormous opportunities but also tremendous challenges, given the complex integration at networking, application, security and operational levels. User organisations will need to understand and contend with the change from closed to more open and hybrid architectures and adapt operations and training methods to harvest the rewards of the improved capabilities. 

During this period technical challenges related to security, device-to-device communication as well as satellite connectivity need to be resolved. Fortunately work in the standardisation in many of these areas is progressing.  In addition, Mission Critical Services (MCX) certification is now available for MCPTT (Mission Critical Push-to-Talk) and will be expanded to include data and video. 
Industry has shown in the past its ability to evolve multivendor standardised interoperable narrowband and consumer communications solutions. Much effort has and continues to be invested in doing likewise for mission critical broadband.

Please share your predictions for Critical Communications for year 2025

The direction will be overwhelmingly characterised by the roll-out and adoption of mission critical broadband services in nationwide shared government and PPDR networks. The growth of private mission critical broadband networks in our sectors will continue, providing equitable spectrum access is made available in jurisdictions.  

Mobile network operators are becoming increasingly important in the delivery of services to our sectors, and this is requiring them to consider a change from traditional ‘best endeavour’ consumer/enterprise services to higher service level guarantees, security and resilience. There is growing recognition that industry, government, standards bodies, professional user sectors and network operators must co-operate closely to ensure practical, economical interoperable secure solutions are available. It is important that nations like India invest in such international collaboration.

New technologies: How is TCCA preparing for the integration of 5G, AI, and other emerging technologies in critical communication systems?

Much work is already progressed in 5G from both 3GPP standards perspective for many of the essential critical communications capabilities, and vendors and network operators are already deploying solutions capable of supporting available features. Work continues with ongoing feature enhancements in 5G Advanced and non-terrestrial networks, and positioning forming is commencing with 6G with TCCA providing input. Sidelink with multi-hop in 5G offers some promising solutions for solving the device-to-device requirements of critical users. 

Our community including network operators are devoting significant effort in understanding how AI can improve network operations and efficiency and provisioning. Likewise, AI is being evolved to help more efficiently manage dataflows, especially in disseminating and managing essential information required by our sector end user operations in areas such as call taking, command and control, situational awareness, preparedness and response effectiveness.

Significant attention must be still devoted to delivering the most seamless connectivity to critical users given the trend and need for a hybrid technology approach to delivering trusted secure connectivity where and when it is required. Success will only be possible through local, regional and inter-sector collaboration. TCCA looks forward to continuing its role as a leading association driving for safer societies through its representation of critical industry sector requirements.