New Research Details Ways to Improve Voice Quality of Emergency Communications

One of the most challenging aspects of public safety communications is maintaining audio quality in the harsh noise environments in which fire fighters, police officers and other first responders operate. The National Public Safety Telecommunications Council (NPSTC), a federation of public safety organizations, has identified audio quality as a critical requirement, noting that first responders have an immediate and sometimes life-and-death need to understand exactly what is being communicated during an emergency.

On Sept 30, the Institute for Telecommunications Sciences (ITS), National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s research laboratory in Boulder (CO), has released a new report that describes an effort to identify which digital speech and audio technologies are best-suited for mission-critical voice communications over a fourth generation (4G) wireless network using cellular infrastructure. We hope that the detailed results described in this report can inform some of the design decisions required to deploy mission-critical voice applications for LTE and will eventually result in better communications for first responders.