TETRA’s Role in a Digital, Broadband World
It is still far from certain that LTE will ever replicate the full functionality available on TETRA networks, which already satisfy as much as 95 percent of professional users’ requirements.
There are clear benefits to be gained moving from analog to digital communications. The global mobile radio industry has embraced this process and the switch from analog to digital should largely be completed before the end of this decade. Manufacturers are withdrawing support for the majority of their analog products, and many regulators have been encouraging their replacement by more spectrally efficient, feature-rich, data-friendly standards-based technologies.
TETRA was at the forefront of this digital trend during the late 1990s and early years of this century. The standard has been adopted in more than 125 countries providing secure, reliable, high capacity voice and data services to a full range of professional users. More than 3 million TETRA terminals have now been sold worldwide.
Of course, TETRA has had — and continues to have — worthy rivals that have pushed it hard along the way. Matra Communications withdrew early on from TETRA standardization to develop a rival technology, named TETRAPOL. TETRAPOL rolled out successfully in a limited number of global markets. Matra has since become part of EADS and then Cassidian, the main network supplier to the German government rolling out the largest TETRA network in the world.
In North America, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) Project 25 (P25) standard was chosen by authorities to solve the acute lack of interoperability among the radio solutions of federal, state, tribal and local authorities serving a diverse range of urban, suburban and rural communities across the United States and Canada. As a response to 9/11 and a series of well-documented natural and man-made disasters during the 1990s and 2000s, P25 adoption was encouraged and accelerated by the U.S. government through a combination of legislation and grants. The lack of a comprehensive interoperability program, limited data capabilities and the slow movement towards more spectrally efficient Phase 2 solutions has kept equipment prices higher than many cash-strapped authorities had hoped for. A unique set of complex circumstances within public safety has led the U.S. government to move forward with a nationwide broadband network under the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet), which is still in its early stages.
In 2005, Motorola launched its MOTOTRBO solution, based on the emerging European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) standard with a number of proprietary features. Other companies have since developed solutions, fully compliant to the DMR standard. DMR Tier 2 is seen as a digital replacement for the large, global installed base of conventional analog radios, offering clear benefits and additional capacity for low-tier, traditional LMR users; whereas the recently launched DMR Tier 3 is targeting the analog trunked radio market — MPT 1327 and logic trunked radio (LTR) — and could be seen as a potential threat to TETRA and P25 in some vertical markets.
And then we have Long Term Evolution (LTE), public safety’s planned broadband technology. The main commercial players are committing billions of dollars in research and development (R&D) to LTE, the long-term evolution of the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) networks around the world serving 5 billion connections. The U.S. government has allocated 2 by 10 megahertz in the 700 MHz band for a nationwide public-safety LTE network together with the promise of up to US$7 billion from future spectrum auctions whose precise rules have not even been defined yet. The U.K. Home Office recently made the bold announcement that LTE could replace the Airwave public-safety TETRA network by 2020. European operators are already looking beyond TETRA for their high-speed data requirements. Thank you very much, TETRA, for pointing us in the right direction, but now the time is approaching for you to retire gracefully. LTE will take your place. Or will it?
As the evidence stacks up against TETRA and powerful interests start to look beyond LMR, my belief is that TETRA is in fact not just the past and the present, but the future as well. Although European public-safety operators are already looking beyond TETRA to satisfy their requirements, the non-European public-safety sector continues to choose TETRA, with the exception of North America where P25 is entrenched. However, TETRA is more than public safety. In fact, the majority of TETRA deployments around the world are now outside of public safety.
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Source: Radioresourcemag
Editor: Peter Clemons
