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“Competition drives down price. I happen to, in a previous life, have been vaguely involved in pricing what we thought a TETRA system might cost. We made an allowance of x for each terminal – but the real price is actually one-third x. And that’s really due to competition, which clearly doesn’t exist in proprietary solutions. Also, most importantly, it guarantees longevity to both users and operators. It gives them the confidence to invest in this type of solution.” Malcolm Quelch, chairman of Working Group 1, offered a flavour of what is now in the user requirement specification – and appealed for further help in developing it. “It’s very much dominated by law enforcement”, he said. “I could use some more assistance in making it a broader church.” A true answer A closer look at possible technologies was provided by David Chater-Lea, chairman of the working group dealing with high-speed data. “Clearly, you could argue that I could just say ‘LTE’ and leave the stage now, but that may not be the entire answer”, he said. “So I want to talk a little about how we get the true answer. And remember that ETSI works by consensus. “What we’ve got to do is make sure that whatever technology we choose or adapt has to suit our industry’s needs – but it has to be standards-based. And I make no apology for reiterating what’s been said a couple of times today already: we are too small an industry. We cannot have something that is not made by everybody, because otherwise we end up with tiny little markets and terribly expensive terminals. “And of course the same is true with spectrum.... Every different band costs me money to enter, as a manufacturer – so clearly I want to reduce that and lower my prices to you.” In the shorter term, his group was working on TEDS to improve its throughput and range. “It will never do full motion video with loads and loads of streams, but it will help with what you have now”, he said. But for broadband data, the OFDMA technology used in LTE (and also WiMAX) was currently the best in class. “LTE can provide the data pipe, it can provide a one-to-one data pipe very, very well. It’s some of the other, the group stuff and the secure stuff and the prioritization stuff that we’ve got a problem with. What we might have to do is standardize instead a way of fitting TETRA over the top of LTE and so we almost become another application that uses the LTE protocol stack. That might well be the way forward. Then you can argue about how you should go about doing that. “So should we take TETRA, all of the stuff that TETRA does, and put it in IP packets and send it right the way through – or is there actually something else out there in LTE already to make dispatch-like calls? There are various things. I think yesterday one of the speakers talked about SIP as a protocol, or push-to-talk over cellular as a usage of that protocol. There’s stuff out there that exists.” But he added: “LTE will never provide the same level of security as TETRA does natively because it doesn’t go to such lengths to hide things like identity and signalling at the radio level and I think it might be difficult for us to add that in.” What users want During the meeting’s closing discussion session, Phil Kidner, of the TCCA, returned once more to the user requirement. “To confine ourselves to user requirements based on what we do today might not convey what we actually want”, he said. “I think Emmanuelle from Tetrapol summed it up this morning. She said, ‘actually we don’t know what we want yet. We are looking at it through 2012 eyes and we should be looking at it through 2020 eyes, and we don’t know what we see’. How do we overcome that?” “I’d like to take that one just briefly”, said David Chater-Lea. “In the joint meetings the users had together, we kept saying ‘think 2025’.... You are into crystal-ball territory, but you just have to assume that things like video will be far more part of it, multimedia will be far more part of it. And how do we translate what looks like Facebook or Twitter or something like that into a public safety, government, critical infrastructure sort of environment? We don’t know the answer, but the sort of things that those applications require are things that we’re going to have to provide.” However, not everyone was confident about LTE. Adrian Grilli, representing the European Utilities Telecoms Council, listed a series of technical concerns about casting his industry’s lot in with the LTE community. Among these was spectrum. “We’re looking at WiMAX because we are looking at a lower bandwidth and channelization and the technology will suit us”, he said. “We can get 1·4?MHz bandwidth, we can get small blocks of spectrum that we can operate in. Our concern is that the public operators are going to drive the technology to much greater bandwidth than we need... We will find we will get spectrum, but we can’t get equipment which will operate in the bandwidths which we have available to us.”
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