Aimed at mission-critical users in both civil and military applications, the Thales Every Talk broadband terminal wraps a range of multimedia capabilities – data, images, video, live feeds, face recognition and database queries – into a single, rugged smartphone.

On the Thales stand, Jean-Michel Lagarde, vice-president in charge of the company’s network and infrastructure systems, explained why the company had chosen now to develop a broadband TETRA PDA. “Mobility is everywhere”, he said. “Networks are doing more and more, and the whole ecosystem is becoming smarter.” But threats, he added, were growing – from natural disasters such as the recent Japanese tragedy, and from cyber-attacks which are increasing in both numbers and seriousness. In the latter case, with everything more connected, the damage caused by a small number of people, Lagarde added, “can travel very far”.

The easy-to-use Every Talk was described by Thales as the first full-featured, ruggedized push-to-talk terminal for the PMR community offering true broadband connectivity over a private network to PMR users. With a 3·2-inch screen, its key functions include multimedia information sharing, multi-mode connectivity, a high data rate, integrated GPS and an integrated push-to-talk button.

The device is designed to operate across WiMAX, LTE and Wi-Fi networks and it is Bluetooth capable. The handset has a ‘full comms’ battery life of four hours, but in a ‘normal’ day is expected to offer 12 hours of use.

In support of the handset, a Thales App Store is being populated with mission-critical applications for use by a range of security and other first-responder and utility services. Thales is currently contracting a number of Android developers for this task.

Situational awareness

Lagarde went on to say that customers want the fullest situational awareness possible from their equipment to assess threats in real time in order to be able to deploy the right resources in the right place at the right time.

“Interoperability and joint operations with other agencies”, he said, “must continue to be addressed and is no longer something limited to voice but includes multimedia, with video needed more and more by different agencies. Eighty per cent of data traffic by 2014 will be video. That’s why two years ago we decided that broadband PMR was a key evolution we had to address.”

Sebastian Sebatier, also of Thales, said: “We are developing a 4G technology faster than any other, whether it’s across WiMAX or LTE infrastructure.” To illustrate the potential gain in speed, he took as an example a policeman sending two pictures back to control from his handset: using TETRA 1 this action would take 55 minutes; with TETRA 2, seven minutes; with HSDPA, 38 seconds. But using the Thales TeMax technology portfolio, into which the Every Talk smartphone fits, it would take only three seconds.

TeMax, he said, creates a single radio network for voice, data and video, adapted to mission-critical requirements and offering push-to-communicate facility that handles all the applications required operationally today.