Nina Myren is the deputy head of department/specialist adviser strategy at the Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection (DSB). She has been involved in the development and introduction of the countrywide critical communications network in Norway, called Nødnett. Today, she works to further develop Nødnett and ensure emergency preparedness through secure and robust public-safety communications and forward-looking technological solutions. Myren was elected to represent DSB on TCCA’s board in June.

Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) announced a new funding opportunity, the NIST Public Safety Innovation Accelerator Program (PSIAP) First Responder 3D Indoor Tracking (FR3D) Prize. The competition aims to achieve performance of sensors and systems for localization and tracking of first responders operating indoors in a variety of building environments without pre-deployed dedicated infrastructure.

The FCC modified the temporary freeze on the acceptance of certain applications related to LMR services operating in the 896 – 901/935 – 940 MHz band following a request from pdvWireless, doing business as Anterix. The commission said the freeze will provide greater flexibility for 900 MHz band incumbents to relocate out of the broadband segment that the commission has proposed in a pending rulemaking proceeding.

AT&T plans to sell its wireless and wireline operations in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) to Liberty Latin America, while retaining its First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet) responsibilities.

Several public-safety professionals and jurisdictions, along with commercial carriers, said the FCC should require interoperability between the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet) and other Long Term Evolution (LTE) carriers and LMR networks, while FirstNet and its contractor AT&T said third-party interoperability is not outlined in the legislation that created FirstNet.

The BroadWay Pre-Commercial Procurement project selected four consortia led by Airbus DS Secure Land Communications (SLC), Frequentis, Leonardo and Rohill to lead efforts in developing a pan-European mobile broadband system for public safety.

A new report from IHS Markit Technology said there is steady growth across sectors for TETRA terminals. The increase in demand is led by the industrial user vertical, where 8% increase in compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is predicted to 2023. Other markets with more than 5% anticipated growth include transport and utilities, while the public-safety market is predicted to grow its TETRA installed base by more than 4% in the 12 months to December 2020.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) published an open letter to Facebook from international law enforcement partners from the United States, United Kingdom and Australia in response to the company’s publicly announced plans to implement end-to-end-encryption across its messaging services.

Apple executives outlined two new 9-1-1-related features introduced in iOS 13 in an FCC filing. The features include location-based routing (LBR) of 9-1-1 calls and text to 9-1-1.

Motorola Solutions made a strategic investment in GreenKey Technologies (GK), a provider of natural language processing for domain-specific workflows. Motorola Solutions is beginning to deploy its automated speech recognition technology across its command center suite.