Use of the network will be governed by agreements drawn up with every municipality, defining exactly who pays what. 

However, in Norway’s very open political environment, very full information about the project has to be made public, and DNK has found itself facing frequently hostile coverage in the media.

“We involved all the user groups from Day One”, says Mr Lyngstøl. “All their equipment, they can specify themselves, and they kind of get Santa Claus to come with the money (that’s the Treasury, paying for everything!). And then we bring the municipalities, and they don’t want to pay for anything!

“This is our world”, he declares. “You have to be a diplomat – but you also have to have the guts it takes to make it move forward. And of course you shouldn’t care too much about what is being said negatively in the media.”

Coverage, capacity

To cover this large, thinly populated, mountainous land, it was first necessary to decide what the coverage requirements really were. “There are quite huge areas here with very few or maybe even no inhabitants”, says Mr Lyngstøl, gesturing at the map. “Normally there is no radio traffic at all. And when something extreme happens, we really need capacity.

“But we have now decided – and it was decided before this incident – that the whole country will have base stations with a minimum of two base radios [two TETRA radio carriers, offering seven communications channels].

“Of course, the personnel in the public safety agencies, they’ll know that there may be a limitation in the country where you can only reach one base station and it has two base radios. They have to learn how to utilize that. But I think they are quite satisfied with that approach.”?

The number of sites required will be over 1900. Project manager Dagfinn Sjøvik explains that the exact number is up to the supplier. “We have a coverage guarantee that is the basis of the contract”, he says. “We have rolled out 240, approximately, here... and we are being upgraded to a two-carrier solution with the addition of TEDS on top of that again.”

But he continues: “We experienced all flavours of problems in the roll-out that every project will get, in radiation-permitting problems and all that. We experienced that in the first phase here, and we expect the same issues in the rest of the country – although I will say that July 22 is helping a lot for awareness on the political level. That has enabled us to avoid a lot of the problems that we expected in getting building permits for sites.

“We are very careful of using that in the wrong way”, he adds, quickly. “But of course [people] now understand that they really need the service – and they understand that to get the service, they need masts around, and to get a mast we need a permit. With that said, our ambition of course is to have as few new sites as possible and the target, together with the supplier, is to use as much as possible co-lo existing sites.”

Here it helps that very few places in Norway are untouched by mobile phone coverage. Telenor, as the main public mobile telephone operator, has some 6500 base station sites in use. However, a consequence of this universality is that users’ expectations of the new TETRA system are set very high.

“It would have been much easier to build this network 5–10 years ago, because now people are spoiled”, laments Mr Lyngstøl. “They can use the mobile network everywhere, and they expect so much in these terminals.

“In Norway, it’s common now to have a smartphone. Very few people (older people, and so on) use small, simple terminals. There’s been an explosion here and people expect everything from Day One. And of course, this is a network where the State is covering the cost. It is not a commercial network with millions of users generating cash.”

A separate coverage problem resulting from Norway’s mountainous terrain is its many road tunnels. TETRA enhancement has already been installed in 44 tunnels – but Mr Lyngstøl adds: “From what we know today, we probably have to build coverage in at least 200 tunnels in this country. At each of those projects there is something to mention. Some of these tunnels are very long.”

Discussion continues on which ones are to be included in the roll-out, because coverage systems are not cheap. In some tunnels, the traffic load is light, yet the consequences of an accident could be serious.

Deploying TEDS

Wireless data coverage is another feature today’s mobile users expect, but DNK intends to begin cautiously by introducing it to just 30–40 per cent of the network, to gain experience. “We will see how successful that is and what we will do with the rest of the network in the future”, Mr Lyngstøl says.
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