TWC 2012 interview: Airwave CEO Richard Bobbett on reducing the cost of TETRA networks
Richard Bobbett, CEO of Airwave Solutions, talks about operating the UK’s TETRA public safety network, to find out about its new enhanced repeater, preparations for the 2012 Olympics and the future of the public safety communications
Budgets for public safety organisations are under pressure in many countries, not least the UK, so anything that helps to reduce their communication costs is going to be welcome.
Airwave Solutions, working in partnership with Axell Wireless, chose this year’s TETRA World Congress in Dubai to unveil a piece of kit that should go a long way to reducing the cost of both building and operating TETRA networks (see interview with Axell Wireless MD Ian Brown for more details on the technology).
The enhanced repeater introduces some clever variable delay technology that cancels out interference between base stations that can lead to dropped or noisy calls. What this allows a network operator to do is to reduce a seven or eight base base station architecture, for example, to just two base stations.
One central base station is beefed up and transmits to a series of enhanced repeaters, which are much cheaper than base stations. As base stations have to operate on different frequencies to avoid interfering with each other, if you get rid of a number of them, you can then operate that area on just one frequency, which frees up precious spectrum.
‘The enhanced repeater is a great opportunity to roll out coverage at a different price than we’ve ever seen in the industry before,’ says Bobbett emphatically. ‘The great thing about it is that it takes some fairly basic technology that has been around for ages and solves some of the implementation problems that you will have seen in traditional network architectures, such as interference and timing issues.
‘We are working with the guys at Axell, who are well known and trusted, so it’s a great partnership,’ says Bobbett, ‘By providing this extra enhancement, we can get into the market quickly and deliver coverage in a way that has never been delivered before - whether that is delivering more coverage at the same price or the same coverage at a lower cost. That’s an exciting prospect.’
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Source: Wireless
