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TETRA is a voice and data system, and of all the various technologies out there today it has the best data rates available. If you take a UK police force as an example, they can deliver colour pictures to the screens of their voice radio handsets today. TETRA’s existing narrow-band capabilities meet most current public safety requirements. But we want to improve TETRA, and TEDS is part of that and is being delivered now. This wideband evolution will deliver data rates ten times faster than we have today. After that we have the broadband moves I mentioned earlier. The bottom line is that TETRA delivers the best data rates of any PMR technology today and those data rates meet most current public safety needs. How has progress in the area of standards impacted product development within the TETRA manufacturing community? PK: Standards have been done and dusted for some time and we’re now working on the next evolution. However, there are some bits of the existing standards which have not been delivered for one or two reasons. The most significant which comes to mind is the Inter-Systems Interface (ISI). This is a very controversial area as different people have different views, but I’ll tell you what I believe the position to be. ISI has been standardized. It is proving to be extremely complicated to deliver and there have been a number of projects within Europe – national infrastructure studies, three-country pilots, and other ongoing projects today – which have all been looking at how this can be best implemented. Technology has moved on, so we can now join systems more easily at a voice level. But the requirement still remains for international roaming, and that effort is ongoing and is TETRA’s biggest outstanding issue. This is currently in work and some of the IOP (interoperability) work is complete. We’re almost there but not quite. One of the key successes of TETRA has been the interoperability process run for us by the Italian Government. There are currently 18 manufacturers actively involved in that, giving end users freedom of choice. They can go to one manufacturer and buy infrastructure, for instance, and then go to other manufacturers to buy terminals. That means that a global market has been created with lots of manufacturers in it, and that increased competition has driven up the functionality of equipment, with players being innovative in their designs to encourage users to buy their products. But it has also driven down prices. TETRA offers the greatest functionality available to any users in this marketplace today. If you compare all the other technologies in the world, there is no better system at doing what it does. Of course I’m biased – but it’s true and it’s a direct result of having that big pool of manufacturers. And yet, this is still a niche market. In the UK, for example, on what is currently the biggest operating system in the world, there are still only 250?000 TETRA terminals in use. What is ETSI’s role today within the TETRA community and how does the relationship work between ETSI and your own organization? PK: ETSI is the global standards body and TETRA is just one of the standards in its portfolio. They do all the standards work. There is the ETSI TC TETRA WG1, which is the gateway to ETSI. So user requirements, for instance, go through this body. We ourselves have a body called the Operator User Association to which requirements within our world come. We took the decision a couple of years ago to hold joint meetings between these working groups. So if, for example, there is a requirement from Sweden relating to some aspect of TETRA, then it goes into this joint group, which decides if the requirement is a standardization issue or an interoperability issue. At that point it goes off to the appropriate body. TC TETRA comprises a number of working groups looking at different aspects of TETRA. The TETRA Association is currently sponsoring the chairman of TC TETRA – we pay his expenses – not so we have undue influence over them, but to cement this relationship and share joint priorities between the two organizations. How many TETRA networks have now been deployed across Europe and who are the main European users? PK: If you look at a map of Europe, the overwhelming majority of TETRA networks across the continent are for public safety users. There are some Tetrapol networks, but even in the countries like Spain and France, where Tetrapol networks operate, there are also a lot of TETRA networks. And a number of TETRA networks support other industry sectors, as I mentioned earlier. But the big systems are in the public safety sector such as in Sweden, the UK, Germany and Italy – the last two of which are still rolling out and will be the biggest. Other TETRA networks are established in Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Finland and Norway, to name a few.
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