In Engineering it has been known for hundreds of years that you should never put everything on one card and that you have to be prepared for the eventualities of life. Not only during the recent pandemic period, but also natural disasters, climate change and terrorism. This is demonstrated to us every hour from around the world. Cellular mobility alone has too many interdependencies to be reliable enough for critical communications.

Critical communication, communication in dangerous situations, communication in health care, in industry, with energy suppliers, in transport and machine-to-machine is unthinkable without diversified mobile communications. A key contribution to this is the proven technology of paging. For years pagers have not been used as much by private individuals, but almost always in a professional environment. With the decisions of such multigovernmental leading telecommunication and technology organizations as ETSI and CEPT from 2007, 2010 and 2013, the high level of topicality of the solutions, which are also called narrowband point to multipoint (NP2M), was underscored several times. Paging and narrowband, also IoT, are among the latest developments in mobile communication.

With technical progress in hardware integration and in event-related operation using software-as-a-service (SaaS), the above-mentioned technologies have become even more important and can be better integrated into hybrid multichannel solutions.

The discussion related to these questions about alarming, warning, timely mass distribution of critical content, the development and manufacture of end devices and solutions needs a place. The right place is the Critical Messaging Association. CMA invites all market participants who have common interest in the applications mentioned, in secure communication, in multichannel and paging. By having members from various industries, from public administrations, from the manufacturers, operators and users, CMA provides a forum for open discussion and action leading to new products and applications that solve problems.

CMA activley holds Summits, inviting leading people to assess with us the newest trends. We are active on the web, and in various channels of social media, helping our members in a very efficient manner by being more visible than others. We exchange technical successes and challenges and we publish white papers and other documents.

This happens with the high engagement of our members and users of our technologies. Our members are able to influence what should and will happen in alternative (not only, but mostly) wireless emergency and critical communications in the coming years.

Dietmar Gollnick. Chairman CMA Association