Putting the case for TETRA, Tony Gray, chairman of the Critical Communications Broadband Group (CCBG), countered: “In the case of the Netherlands police, I truly hope that they are not sending mission-critical data over commercial networks. My question arising from that would be: ‘What happens when those networks are not available?’ ”

“In the next five years we’ll end up with this kind of information being processed in real-time intelligence centres and being sent out to the officers on the street”, Mr Hitman replied. “It will give us the information to act properly. We don’t want to send an overload of information to the officers on the street, but we need the Internet and we need mobile broadband. We won’t stop because there is not yet a mission-critical broadband network in the Netherlands, because then we lose track of our society.”

Concluding, Mr Gray surveyed the road ahead. “Our whole role in the CCBG is to find you the mechanism to safely, securely, and reliably send and receive information to the user on the street”, he said. “We are going to leverage commercial technology but we are going to make sure that that commercial technology is set up in the right way and standardized in the right way to serve your needs, and delivered in the form of a network that is rugged, reliable, resilient and secure in the way that we need it to be.”

Digital migration

The conference also included a wide range of case studies from bodies which have recently installed TETRA systems. 

Alexi Tomachesky from T Helper, a Russian systems integrator, described the extreme conditions technicians had to contend with when installing the longest TETRA network in the world, to serve a 5500?km oil pipeline in Siberia.

“In the summer time we have a lot of rain and swamps”, he reported. “In the wintertime it is very cold with a lot of snow. The temperature difference throughout the year is very big: from –55° to +45°.”

Sanjay Sahay from the Bangalore police gave an illuminating assessment of the expansion of TETRA networks for police in India and the financial and technical constraints they are under. “The police have a problem with internal technical expertise, so they expect the system integrator to run the system for them for quite a time”, he said, adding: “The police are very worried about their level of technical competence.

“It is very clear they need TETRA. They want the coverage; they want the quality of service and connection to the legacy system. The TETRA terminal is quite expensive to give to 80?000 constables in the Maharashtra province, for example. The number of constables is huge and they cannot afford to give to each one, so they need to have interoperability with the legacy system.”

Among other topics was a focus on TETRA in the Middle East, where it is seeing huge growth, especially in the oil and gas sector.

Radio applications

Applications were also a hot topic across the three days. Hannu Aronsson, chairman of the applications working group for the TCCA, reviewed the current situation and looked ahead to what will be possible in the future.

“If you look at the users of TETRA, they have all kinds of different needs, so the applications for different users are always slightly different to match the operations of that industry or public safety organization”, he said.

“What we are trying to do at the TCCA is try to help people utilize the different features of TETRA and use them as effectively as possible to really get the data benefits out of TETRA.”

The second morning ended with a panel discussion where Christo Kriek, programme manager at Sasol Shared Services, which runs a TETRA network at a large synthetic fuels refinery in South Africa, described how he was employing data applications.

“We are currently using a lot of telemetry at all our 16 base stations where we are monitoring the electricity used and the temperatures inside, as this has maintenance implications to our equipment”, he explained “That is working perfectly with the SDS. SDS is a very efficient transfer of data so we prefer to use that.”

He confirmed that TETRA was providing sufficient bandwidth for these requirements. “We are currently working on two more pilots that will probably also use SDS because of this efficiency.”

Working together

Summing up, Hannu Aronsson returned to a common theme of the conference – the future data demands of the TETRA community. “If you look at the activities of the TCCA Broadband Group, they are talking with P25 people, with DMR people, with LTE people, because we see that the important thing is to serve this community of users”, he said. “We see there is a real need for broadband services and so we are trying to make it happen in a way that these broadband services are suitable for mission-critical users. There is a lot of co-operation. 
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