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“What is special in this approach is that until now every user community could contract themselves with one or another commercial operator to have data capacity, to buy data capacity, but they did it in their own corner. The biggest organizations didn’t have any problems to have a good deal with the commercial operators; but if you are a small local police or small local fire service, then it becomes very difficult. We have the federal police and then we have almost 200 local police forces and more than 200 local fire services. So we have a lot of them. “So why shouldn’t we do exactly the same as we did with the TETRA network for voice? – propose ourselves as the integrator, as the service deliverer for all security services; buy the capacity, make a good agreement with the commercial operators; and make some good proposals to all the security services on the same level so that a smaller, local police service has the same sort of advantages as the bigger, national police.” Information: www.astrid.be Improving in-building coverage"What we are showcasing today is a new digital repeater, which previously has been only available in a channelized version”, says John Ellis, from Axell Wireless in France. “And now we are able to offer it either with a personality that is channelized or with a personality that is band-selective. The customer can decide whether he wants to have a band-selective version where he can define the passband. It’s interesting, maybe for the TETRA requirements where they have got more than eight channels. I see a lot of business in France for Tetrapol, where we have up to 40 carriers on a base station site.” In Belgium, Mr Ellis adds, there is a legal requirement that new developments such as buildings, cinemas and car parks must be equipped to provide indoor coverage for the emergency services. Axell won a contract a year ago to supply further repeaters for the Astrid network, but the company also expects to begin renewing some of the original repeaters deployed in 2003–4, together with their supervision system. “At the moment we’ve probably got over 100 repeaters in Belgium on the network, so there will be a requirement to change to newer technology, simpler technology. And they are starting to look at fibre repeaters. We did a system just about a year ago where a new rail tunnel was built going out of the airport and we were having fibre repeaters with two fibre feeds. So you’ve got total redundancy: if the base station falls over, you will still get the second base station feeding the repeater.” Integrated mobile data, nationwide"Mons is a very important show for us because we’ve been working in Belgium for quite a few years now”, said Nick Koiza, of the mobile data specialist Portalify. “We are supporting Astrid, the operator here. They have rolled out a very large mobile data platform called Mobile Data Connectivity Server. That’s basically a deployment of our core product. It allows back-end integration with many of their users and also allows them to communicate from the field.” At the show, Portalify revealed details of this nationwide deployment, for which it has supplied a mobile data gateway which not only meets the needs of present TETRA operations but also integrates with Astrid’s plans for MVNO provision in the future. “We had to make sure that the connectivity between the back-office world and the radio world was in place for TETRA but also for other technologies”, Mr Koiza continued. “And we had to allow integrated applications for mission-critical operations – for example, the ability to do mobile queries, to dispatch in the field, picture messaging, alerts to the right people in the field – and we also had to provide location services for 40 000 nationwide users, consisting of the tracking of vehicles and the tracking of people. “And we had to provide a solution to different devices in the field – as well as a diversity of TETRA terminals from all the major manufacturers, to mobile data terminals and smart phones and PDAs. “The way in which we provided that solution was essentially with our Data Management Server, which is a product that allows integration to multiple back-office systems across different user groups, across different wireless technologies. This enables you to manage the information you are receiving and also to transfer information and to store information. “You can use the DMS platform for your portfolio of applications – for mobile query, for picture messaging, for task management, for location services. And you can use this platform to present information to another application called the Integrated Applications Console, which makes use of location information, video and textual information as well as pictures and presents it to an integrated user interface consisting of different merged applications.
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