LTE Drives TETRA Growth

Reflecting a new community of interest in the professional radio world as users of TETRA, Tetrapol, GSM-R and other technologies each seek a path towards wireless broadband, the year’s main congress, staged in Paris in May, assumed a new title - Critical Communications World. Phil Kidner, chief executive of the sponsoring organisation, the TETRA and Critical Communications Association, explained that the change was in recognition of the event’s widening subject area; nonetheless, visitors to the event soon spotted advanced publicity for the 2014 show, which revealed that it was to resume its former identity in Bangkok as the Tetra World Congress. But shortly after the doors closed in Paris, it turned out that the title had flipped yet again and that it will be Critical Communications World once more.

Despite these changes of gear, the Tetra world continues to enjoy good health, again clocking up record sales of radio terminals. “We’ve had record years for the last three years”, Mr Kidner said. “2012 was 12 per cent up on 2011 and there was a similar increase the year before. So this business is mature but is growing big-time and continuing to grow.”

Major growth areas for Tetra around the world include public safety and transport, but applications in industry and public utilities are taking off too. At the same time, new contracts continue to be placed by public safety organisations. Mr Kidner highlighted developments in the US and Canada, formerly a no-go area for Tetra technology. “For the first time we are allowed into North America, so we now have a number of different contracts in a number of different sectors”, he said. “The latest one on the screen behind me is a gold mine, but we have in the utilities, the military, we have in transport. So from a zero base we are beginning to grow slowly into Canada and the US.”

Critical decisions

An update on the campaign to deliver broadband technology was provided at a TCCA presentation by Tony Gray, chairman of the association’s Critical Communications Broadband Group (CCBG). “Our goals are simply stated”, he explained. “We want critical comms users for the future to be able to access their information systems, their applications and so on, reliably and at broadband speeds, on their professional mobile devices. More than that, we have to make sure that they can do that with the same reliability and the same availability and the same security as they have today.”

With this in mind, the group is pushing for the creation of a single technology standard to address the data needs of all types of critical communications users around the world, with a harmonised frequency band to accommodate it. LTE technology at 700?MHz is seen as the prize. The CCBG has been pursuing this cause with relevant standardisation bodies while at the same time lobbying spectrum regulators to provide spectrum in which the new broadband solutions can operate.

“We have made some progress already on standards”, Tony Gray continued. “We have two work items accepted in 3GPP (the standards organisation), one for group working and one for direct mode, neither of which is a capability that is inherent in the LTE of today. And so both of those capabilities will be standardised in the next release of the LTE standard, Release 12. We are also working in 3GPP towards more resilience and security and ultimately to allow critical comms speech as well as data services. So we have GCSE as it’s called [Group Call System Enabler] and ProSe [Proximity Services] accepted as work items within 3GPP, and that work is going forward in 3GPP and ETSI.”

But he warned that the process will be a lengthy one. “There are some pretty long timeframes involved here and we don’t want to set the expectation that just because we are currently working on standards in 3GPP, next year or even the year after, that critical mobile broadband will be a reality. It won’t, and Tetra and other technologies are going to be needed and required for very many years to come.”

During the congress, the United Arab Emirates gained the distinction of being the first country outside the US to announce an allocation for public safety at 700?MHz - a 2 × 10?MHz slot, supplemented by a commercial allocation at 800?MHz.

A secure space

Another TCCA board member, ‘Jeppe’ Jepsen, spoke of the emerging need for a wireless ‘intranet’ for communications users in the vital power and water utilities as well as in public safety forces. “They need mission-critical information”, he declared, “and the communication that they need should be based on dedicated spectrum, because the commercial services are delivering a best-effort service, and that is not good enough.

“It is the safety of the public we are talking about. We hear more and more about cyber-threats. The Internet is under threat, services are being bombarded with denial of service [attacks]. Is that how we want to have our water supply, our electricity supply, our emergency services being under that threat? Or do they need to be better protected?”

Rearranging the spectrum to dedicate a space to critical communications would be a slow process, not least because of the need to negotiate international agreements. But now an opportunity was in prospect at the coming World Radio Conference in Geneva. “This is something that happens every four years, and the next one is 2015”, Mr Jepsen explained. “There, the emergency services and the critical infrastructure organisations have a unique opportunity to have spectrum set aside for the essential services of our society.”

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