At the World Congress, TETRA Today caught up with Tom Quirke, general manager for TETRA at Motorola Solutions, to hear his thoughts on how the industry is developing

What challenges does TETRA face in the next 12 months?

I think there are three challenges that TETRA faces.

The first one is that increasingly we are seeing officers patrolling on their own or in certainly much more reduced groups, basically trying to get frontline officers to cover more ground, cover more area, and that’s for a variety of different reasons. More so than ever before, TETRA is the safety line for first responders. As a vendor community we have to be very conscious of that – those are the primary things that we must make sure beyond all else. 

The second area is ‘do more with less’. The economic climate is what it is. What you see is either budgets are frozen, in some cases being reduced, and people are being told to get more out of what they already have.

The third area is about the future. A lot of things are moving now in terms of TETRA and so how do I actually make sure I don’t take a wrong step and block a path that I’m not aware of, that I might take in the future? Future-proofing!

Is the development of TETRA applications meeting the needs of users?

I think there’s work to be done there. It’s a key area of understanding what TETRA’s capable of now and in the future. There’s a heck of a lot that can be done with TETRA and TEDS. We estimate 80–90 per cent of all the desired applications can be supported by TEDS. So it’s really about getting the vendor community and the end users to work with the software applications providers to go and do that.

We’ve built up a big ecosystem of applications providers, we have a big enterprise business that’s got a lot of independent software vendors and we’ve made sure with our products that we have what we call AT commands – a very easy set of commands that allow application vendors to really get into the radios and get some control mechanisms up there.

But are we seeing enough applications out there? I’d say from general conversations with customers, there’s plenty of room for us to improve. I think customers would be surprised at how quickly with the existing equipment they have they can get a solution.

What emerging markets have you identified and what barriers does TETRA face in those markets?

The cradle of TETRA was really Europe – it’s an ETSI standard. But, sometimes people forget that even in Europe we’re still doing major nationwide rollouts, in fact we’re starting in some countries.

The Norway rollout for us was a $750 million rollout and we’re very privileged to build own and operate that network for the customer until 2026. So when that gets rolled out, TETRA subscribers get added on. 

Similarly in Germany, that rollout continues and there are going to be a lot of TETRA subscribers being added right now as they transition from analogue to digital. So we have to be careful trying to segment the market into ‘being done’ and ‘emerging’. Actually some of those markets have evolved in different ways.

If we take a look at Asia-Pacific, TETRA’s been around for quite some time, but it started in metro and railways. If you look at the major rail links, they’re TETRA-driven, and then public safety came on board. So, obviously Asia is a high growth opportunity for us. The Middle East – there are opportunities there for nationwide rollouts as well. They’re very big when they happen.

If we take a look at the number of countries that have adopted TETRA in the last five years – 57 additional countries – although they’ve adopted TETRA, they’re still rolling them out. 

Latin America is obviously another area for us. When you work in those areas, there are obviously different requirements in terms of size and formats they need and it’s about being close enough to them to listen and provide them.

How well can TETRA meet the growing demand for mobile data?

The thing about mobile data is, first of all, to segment which camp that data is in. One camp is known as ‘service-impacting’ and the other is ‘mission-critical’.

In service-impacting, it gives you applications that give you efficiency. That may be report writing, for instance. In an absolute emergency, a) I wouldn’t use it, and b) I wouldn’t miss it if it disappeared. So, those applications are being serviced by commercial networks.

Interestingly, we have a number of customers who have an express preference for the data bearer on commercial networks – GPRS. That’s the bandwidth they need and its clean and uncongested, even in the major cities.
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