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Then there’s the other set of applications, which ‘I cannot afford to lose in an emergency’. Short messaging, for instance; status updates, GPS location updates and GPS stamping. You don’t want to lose that information in an emergency, because you need to know where people are and their status. Over time, we think it’s going to transition – there will be more applications that initially may have started in the service-impacting and move over to mission-critical. For the majority of those applications, TETRA can deliver it. Anything about status or short messaging, TETRA can do today. You’ve got single-packet data, multi-slot packet data and you have TEDS. Large chunks of the hardware are now TEDS-enabled: we now from this point onwards really don’t sell any infrastructure that’s not TEDS-enabled, so infrastructure is going in that has that capability. The devices are coming with TEDS, and that’s going to provide a whole range of applications that can be used. Where it gets difficult for TETRA is on high-quality video. At that point you have to say, ‘we need to look to another bearer technology’. How do you see the prospects for TEDS rollout? We’re very bullish about it. We think it’s going to be very good because a big investment goes into a secure, resilient network, that’s going to be there when everything else is not. And you’ve got TEDS built on top of that already. I think if you’re going to get people to do that, I think it’s about devices that drive people’s needs and the applications. I’m confident that we’re going to have quite a big community that use and adopt TEDS. We’ve got customers already asking us for this, we’ve got a very strong pull on this, and I think in the future it will be inconceivable not to have TEDS devices in our portfolio offering for TETRA. So ourselves and Cassidian announced our private IOP this morning. We’re very keen to push out TEDS – our customers are pulling us that way because it’s like the icing on the cake. How do you view the moves towards adding broadband wireless capabilities to TETRA? Broadband wireless will be transformational when it comes, because what it gives you is real-time video – high-quality streams and multiple streams at that, so you can have situational awareness, which you never really had before. When describing an event, it can be quite confusing as to what’s going on. If you’d just sent a video stream you’d know what was happening. Being able to send and receive video is really, really pivotal. In addition, what you can do is have real-time up-to-date mapping applications, so if the assets move – i.e. people, cars – you can see that live on your device. So, for us, we see that that base technology is LTE. The reason why we’re doing that is North America has gone first and made their decision. LTE is going to be a truly global standard for the cellular community. We will get the benefits and economies of scale that will come from that. So, it’s absolutely critical that we keep it as an open standard. That for us is pretty pivotal for the future of public safety. Obviously, in North America, we’re deploying LTE networks as we speak, and we announced the first LTE device, the LEX700, only a few weeks ago, so devices and infrastructure are coming online very quickly. It’s happening, it’s here and it is going to be the future of public safety. How realistic is the proposed LTE solution and, furthermore, do you believe it will be ready in time? There are a number of steps for broadband. The first step is spectrum. Realistically, you need to have a minimum of 5 MHz up and 5 MHz down. You need a path to 10MHz up, 10 MHz down. Why do we say this? You won’t have multiple video streams in a confined environment simultaneously if you don’t have that kind of bandwidth. This is not bandwidth we’re saying you require for a national emergency; this is bandwidth for everyday usage. That’s why we advocated it in the US and our customers advocated it in the US and that’s why it’s been secured through the block D spectrum. That journey took quite a long time because it needs to be harmonized spectrum. What we need to do here at the TWC, is to work together to create the community. The meetings are going on right now between the end users about trying to harmonize the spectrum that they have and making sure that they get the right amount. So, we would advocate anywhere near the 700?MHz band would be good because then you’re going to get the economies of scale that are going to come straight out of the US market, and its good for harmonization across different boundaries particularly in Europe and the Middle East. What is absolutely critical is that 5?MHz + 5?MHz: if you have lower than that, it won’t be that much different from TEDS.
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