BSI for ROIP
The BSI draft standard is being developed by Public safety practitioners and interested vendors, and sponsored by the Department Of Homeland Security's (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate; Office for Interoperability and Compatibility(OIC) and National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) Office of Law Enforcement Standards.
A Bridging Systems Interface (BSI) is a hardware or software platform that enables radio system or radio gateway interoperability in an Radio over IP system. The BSI is essentially a "black box" between the radio and the rest of the IP network.
More than a half-dozen companies are currently manufacturing various BSI products, and some (but not all) are incompatible with each other, raising the concern that modern Radio over IP systems may develop with the same inherent and deeply incompatible protocols found in legacy land mobile radio (LMR) technologies already suffered by public safety agencies throughout the U.S. The draft standard for BSI is an effort to avoid the same fate, and if successful, would help provide a competitive market with ever-decreasing costs and increasing performance and features, instead of a closed market dominated by one or two proprietary companies with defacto monopolies serving public safety agencies.
From a memo supporting the draft BSI standard:
Interoperability between radio systems, regardless of the agency level, is crucial to emergency responders. As alluded to previously, interoperability does not exist just on a radio system level but also at an agency level. Agencies need the ability to communicate to other agencies, regardless of level, when authorized to do so; however, incompatibilities among different radio systems often make this difficult. In order to give multiple radio systems the ability to communicate with each other, Bridging Systems Interfaces (BSIs) were developed by many vendors to enable interoperability.