TIA TR-8 Mobile and Personal Private Radio Standards Engineering Committee Continues Standardization Efforts for Land Mobile Radio

 The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) TR-8 Mobile and Personal Private Radio Standards Engineering Committee met at National Harbor, MD the week of October 8-10, 2013 in collocation with TIA 2013: The Future of the Network.  The focus of three days of meeting was in the area of Project 25 and producing a number of documents relating to Packet Data services and Location services.   These features drive the ability to efficiently provide location and packet data to a host device on a fixed network.

Additional work in the encryption APIC task group relating to Link Layer Encryption continued, and was the subject of a two day working meeting on October 9-10, 2013.  The working group meeting is scheduled to reconvene during TR-8 February 2014 meeting.

The newest work on a joint project of TIA TR-8.8 and ATIS is in the area of interoperability between P25 and LTE systems.  This joint project will lead to improved services for first responders.  TR-8.8 Broadband Data Systems Subcommittee is also focused on a series of standards for PTT services over LTE.

Other work continues to progress in the area of interference and propagation, with the continued upgrading of the TSB-88 series of documents in development by TR-8.18.  Two document upgrades in this area were approved for publication.  Also being worked on are standards for signal booster systems within the TR-8.11 subcommittee, along with the agreement to publish two antenna documents.

TIA would like to take the opportunity to welcome a new chair of TR-8.18 Task Group on LTE: Mr. Mike Bake, LTE System Architect of Motorola Solutions. TR-8.18 Task group on LTE investigates the implications of broadband to Private Land Mobile Radio (PLMR) and make recommendations to the Subcommittee on actions.  TIA appreciates the commitment the previous chair Rex Nisbet provided to the Task Group at its starting stage.

The next TR-8 and P25 meetings will take place February 4-6, 2014 in Arizona. TIA welcomes all interested party participants to attend and engage in the committee meetings.

For more information about TR-8 and how to participate in standards development with TIA, contact Marianna Kramarikova at standards@tiaonline.org.

A major function of the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) is the writing and maintenance of voluntary industry standards and specifications. These activities are carried out by the volunteer members of TIA engineering committees. On the public engineering committee pages, users will find recent meeting reports, agendas and notices for upcoming meetings, as well as links to some of the most popular standards from each committee. TIA is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Visit tiaonline.org.