So those sorts of people need dedicated networks of their own, in which they can tailor the coverage to make sure that it meets their needs. The public operators never will do that. Similarly, they don’t provide the levels of resilience that our types of users have come to expect – as a result of which, you’ll find cellular networks that go down to four, five, ten hours at a time. Which might be embarrassing for them, but it’s totally unacceptable if you are providing critical communications.

Moving ahead

So it’s about extending the lifetime of the TETRA ecosystem by taking it in broadband direction?

We are trying to make sure that we encourage the development of standards that will be compatible with current TETRA networks but will meet the requirements going forward. We will therefore try to make sure that the TETRA Association is constructed in a manner that will enable us to go forward and meet those needs.

Demand for broadband

Will the association take an active role in creating and specifying those standards?

Yes and no. The TETRA Association doesn’t create standards. We leave that to the professional standards bodies such as ETSI, 3GPP and the rest. But what we are doing is stimulating within those standards bodies the creation of standards, or the modification of existing standards, that will provide solutions for our types of users. And in TC TETRA, which is the ETSI working group, we have stimulated a project which is looking at providing mobile broadband solutions.

We are pushing them very hard, because the demand has mushroomed in the last year or two. Almost certainly it’s because of things like the iPad. People are saying, ‘If I’ve got an iPad in my ambulance, I could be getting all sorts of information on the patient’.

They’re saying, ‘I can see the advantages of this, but I need to have connectivity that is absolutely 100 per cent reliable and absolutely 100 per cent available – and I can’t necessarily get that from public networks’.

Top priority

But everywhere you look, people seem to be saying there isn’t enough spectrum to have any more broadband unless you go on the public networks. 

That is something that we’ve been working on within the TETRA Association in conjunction with Public Safety Communications Europe, where we have been jointly lobbying the European Commission very hard to try and find harmonized spectrum across Europe.

We need to find solutions not just for public safety and not just for Europe, but that is a very significant start. We’ve been lobbying very hard for the last couple of years in conjunction with some of the user groups and we are starting to have some effect. The latest version of the Commission’s radio spectrum policy programme now includes a requirement to provide spectrum for PPDR [public protection and disaster relief] use. That is a major step forward.

However, spectrum is still allocated on a national basis and therefore we still have a lot of work to do to lobby the individual regulators in individual countries.

Spectrum is absolutely top of our priority list at the moment.

A lengthy process

What’s your feeling about how long it might take to get a result?

Therein lies the problem. Gaining harmonized spectrum is a very long process. It took a long time when we did it the first time round with TETRA. And because you had to get decisions that are made through the WARC process [ITU World Administrative Radio Conference], even to get a decision is going to take you four or five years. And then, assuming they make a favourable decision, it takes four or five years to get that spectrum cleared and made available.

So you’re talking about 10 years plus in order to get the spectrum that we need. But if you don’t start working on it now, it will not appear when it’s needed in the future.

It’s not soon enough. But one of the reasons that TETRA is such a worldwide success is because we succeeded in creating a highly competitive market – and that was created because we had a common technology in harmonized spectrum.

So if we’re going to provide viable solutions in the future, we really need to have harmonized solutions and harmonized technologies. That is our ambition: to try to create a technology that will provide broadband services on a worldwide basis in a harmonized manner. It may be an ambitious target, but it is our target to try to create a single technology worldwide.

Why change?

Changing the name of the association and putting Critical Communications into it: what does that let you do that you couldn’t have done anyway?

It’s not so much what it lets us do – I think that it’s simply reflects more accurately what we already are doing and what our ambitions are.
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