A report from ABI Research found the total mission-critical communications market for base stations, repeaters, handsets and infrastructure in 2022 will be US$10 billion. The North American market continues to account for more than half of this world market with the rapidly growing Asia-Pacific region in second place with a 20 percent market share.

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Europe, Latin America and the Middle East and Africa regions rank third, fourth and fifth respectively.

Public-safety radio was the ancestor of critical communications providing mission-critical voice services and continues to represent over half of this market, followed by the industrial, transportation and utility segments. However, the need for mobile broadband data has also entered the equation driving critical communications systems to evolve to digital radio for data handling and spectrum efficiency. As a result, critical communications systems are slowly evolving from the current TETRA, Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) and Project 25 (P25) to coexist and interoperate with Long Term Evolution (LTE)-based systems.

"We are seeing this evolution take place in the United States with the FirstNet (First Responder Network Authority)/AT&T nationwide public-safety broadband network buildout, and the Emergency Services Network (ESN) builds in the United Kingdom, and with other countries," said Nick Marshall, research director at ABI Research. "This cautious transition relies on co-existence between LTE and the TETRA, DMR and P25 technologies as first responders and other users replace legacy voice functionality with a mission-critical push to talk using LTE.”

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