“It’s a really good, exciting time in TETRA”, said Tom Quirke, General Manager of Motorola Solutions’ Global TETRA product & solutions organization, speaking at PMRExpo. “Germany, as you can see just from the show itself, is very busy, very hectic and it just reflects the amount of activity that is going on in TETRA.

“As we’ve all know for many years, Germany is going to become maybe even the biggest market, certainly in Europe, so it’s very, very important to us. We’ve got a lot of people who work for us in Germany to make sure we are very close to the customer and we’ve been seeing this year, from our perspective, a lot of great wins in the TETRA market.

A radio lifeline

“One thing we never lose sight of is the people who use these radios. This is their lifeline. When everything else is going wrong, it’s going to be the radio they are going to rely on, and that means when we design and develop products, we will go that extra bit further, that extra bit more testing to make sure that they work when they are supposed to work, in the harshest environments.

“And they are designed to be very easy to use, because when everything is going wrong, you don’t actually look at the radio – you just use it automatically. And so we have that assurance in the products that we do.

“We would always say we don’t want to be the cheapest person on the block. That’s not what we want to be. We want to be a company that offers great quality, but it’s great value to our customers because ultimately they get to depend on these products and the products last a long time as well. So it works out great value for our customers. And in environments that many of our customers have used the radios in the past, that’s pretty pivotal.

Adding functionality

“One of the things that TETRA has is a huge number of features that have been built up over many years. In theory you’d be saying: ‘Round about now it ought to be kind of maturing, tailing off; it should be slowing down’. No: it’s all go! We are getting lots of requests – and that allows us to give different kinds of offerings. Many of our customers probably still don’t realize the huge feature set that is embedded in the TETRA offering. 

“Those features are still coming in, coming in all the time, so that’s what makes TETRA very, very exciting. It’s almost like you’ve bought a TETRA system and you are getting these upgrades in software, adding a huge amount of functionality.

“We are excited by that, and we are seeing good, strong demand for TETRA all around the world. It’s almost like now TETRA has become the de facto standard for public safety, outside some big countries around the world (we know one or two of them, right?).

“But we are seeing that it’s the technology of choice. And why is that? Well, in TETRA our customers can influence us and they can influence, more importantly, the standards through the TETRA Association [TCCA], the MoU, and change standards. That’s phenomenal!  That’s the leverage and empowerment our customers have. 

Refreshing the system

“I think we are seeing healthy demand in the TETRA market; we are seeing a very strong maturing of the offerings to the customers, so that they buy stuff.

“But also, when we look forward to network refreshes... Germany is all brand-new, but some of our customers have had TETRA for quite a long time and they will be looking over periods of time about their refresh.

“And on that refresh, what we’re going to offer them is the capability to reduce a lot of their operational expenditures, which is nirvana for a lot of our customers who are under a lot of pressure.

“Reducing the power consumption, [improving] the ease of introducing software, reducing the management: all of that operational expense, we are going to go in and really make a tremendous reduction on it.

Hooking into broadband

“And then what we’re going to do is to provide the hooks in place to allow them – if they want to – to go to a next-generation public safety LTE network.

“You do need to have harmonized frequencies, which is an area that we are working with the industry and with governments as well, certainly across the European region, to make sure of harmonization. But we are making sure that network nodes have the capability to have that integration with an LTE network.

“We are doing that already in the US. We are fortunate that we’ve been winning the majority of certainly the first of the LTE network offerings for public safety, which are dedicated LTE networks. What that means is you make significant investments in a public safety network but you want to keep your options open. So, do I want to go to LTE in the future? I’m not sure. But when I make that decision, I want to be sure that I’ve got a route to get there. And we are doing that through our core network offering.
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