New commercial DMR network in the United Kingdom

After the Netherlands and after Flanders, we are looking to another country to invest in a brand-new network - based, of course, on the availability of frequencies because this is important. Entropia now has a proposition ready for 200 sites in the UK. Why the UK? Because Flanders and the UK have something with each other - the same mentality, the same language, nearly, the same jokes, Flanders Fields and so on! We have been looking to the UK in the past, but it was really not the time to migrate because the MPT technology was really growing. But now the competition is TETRA or digital. We went for digital in Belgium (TETRA) and the Netherlands (TETRA) and we will go for digital, of course, in the UK. The difference in the UK is that you have a lot of radio dealers there - a lot of radio partners - and Entropia distributes the solution via its partners. So we’ll finance the radios for the customers of the partners, and the partners receive, of course, a commission on the radio per month. So a partner can go very easily to a customer and say, ‘OK, these are the amount of radios’. Entropia will finance them but the partner can install them, commission them, program them, and sell some options, accessoires and so on - and will receive a nice commission from Entropia.

Widening horizons

In the UK you have a lot of local systems, a huge amount of local systems. The problem with your local systems is when a local customer wants to have more capacity or even a wider area of coverage. So for partners who are selling local systems, it is an opportunity for them to offer their customers a wider system and service together with Entropia. If you say, for example, ‘Would it be more benefit to use radio instead of a cellphone?’ - first of all, we are not competing against the cellphone solution, but we start with a solution where the cellphone stops. And before you ask about LTE and so on, we still believe in the radio business. First of all, it will work. That’s the very important thing. And secondly, you know that there will be no CAPEX any more for the customer. After 12 months he can say, ‘Have your radio back, I am not satisfieed, I am not using it any more’, or due to any other reason. Of course, you have customers who are going to GSM - but we see a lot of customers coming back from GSM to our networks. That is actually the case. And of course we would like to introduce also our ComBus dispatching solution: you have track-and-trace, you have man-down, you have follow-up, you have reporting and you have connections to all other databases - they are all standard and available on our networks. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s TETRA or DMR. That’s the advantage. We believe the UK is not used to having wider-area coverage with radio. If you could talk from Southampton to Norwich, for example, this would be a great idea. This is how we did it also in the Netherlands and in Belgium. My dream came true, that we covered more than 40,000 square kilometres with one TETRA network, after we previously covered the same area with 150 Fylde MPT sites.  This is the same opportunity we have now in the UK, and a lot of utility companies can take benefit out of it, as they also did in Belgium and the Netherlands. We have them from the smallest ambulance cars up to the European Commission, up to shopping malls, to hospitals, plants in industrial areas and so on.

Starting from London

In the UK, we have acquired a number of frequencies that we can set up now. We will start up in the London area and we are looking for opportunities now. Entropia has targets to set up one site or two sites in London before the end of the year or at the beginning of next year. The problem is that to get into London in the Christmas period can be very hard to do! Over here, in Bruges, they are making publicity saying ‘Go to London for shopping’ since November 11 - Flanders Fields remembrance day - and I hope we are not in traffic jams all the time just to put up one site! We have more than 150 obsolete MPT sites in the warehouse now from the Dutch and Flemish networks; we decommissioned them due to TETRA. We are now talking with Fylde very closely at the moment, to do a swap of the equipments - and then we can roll out a DMR network in the UK. The question is, is DMR a proven technology? But we know Fylde, and we know that if Fylde is promising something we can rely on them. We have a lot of experience with these guys, and if they say yes, why shouldn’t we go for that? So, migration from MPT to DMR is the trick. Hytera is also a partner, with radios, and with Fylde they have a perfect migration solution for this. The M25, Greater London and then the Thames Gateway - this is our goal first. And then we’ll offer the solution to Southampton, Birmingham and then to the south. If other opportunities come to our front door we can do it vice versa, depending on the requests. We will create a kind of an octopus: the head in the middle is London and then we will see. If we acquire some frequencies in the UK which are preferably compatible with Belgium and the Netherlands, then we can offer a very nice possible roaming path for DMR towards Belgium and the Netherlands. That’s not to replace  TETRA, of course, but to fill in gaps some customers are asking for: roaming to/from the UK for specific solutions.

Building out

The coverage depends on the frequencies and so on, but  financial-wise it is already in place that we can roll out a 200-site system. And we know that with TETRA we rolled out a 200-site system in the Netherlands in less than a year, which is more than 40,000 square kilometres. If you calculate 40,000 square kilometres in the UK, it even goes to Norwich and so on. The network needs to be reliable and robust, and especially the switches also need to be redundant and some sites need to have some special tricks, but it’s all IP. If you have an IP backbone, it is built-in to be redundant - and with our Fylde guys, their second name is Redundant! Our frequencies in Belgium and the Netherlands are technology-independent, so this means that if we roll out DMR sites in the UK and we connect them over IP (technically, it is very easy to do so, and it is possible also for Fylde), then we can easily set up a number of sites in Belgium and the Netherlands which are compatible with the UK We have a lot of equipment - we have the cabinets, we have the combiners, cavities and some antennas - but the thing is we have already a profitable business in Belgium and the Netherlands, so the extra cash flow we gain there, we reinvest it in a new network.  This is our mentality.  This is a thing that Entropia did in the past: we always reinvested again and again. We set up one site, we got money, we reinvested it in three sites. We reinvested all the money in four sites, five sites - sometimes with a bank loan to get a little bit faster rollout. But the reinvestment of money has always been really important. We have acquired a budget for that and we will make a start in the UK. Even now, we reinvest in our customers and partners. Together, one plus one is four. In Belgium we are supported by the British Government, Flanders Investment Trade, and so on. We are in discussion with some UK mast allocation groups which are also active in Belgium and the Netherlands. I’ve seen some of the pricing; it fits in our business case. When is the question! If the frequencies are in place and the equipment is in place, we can be very active and I would like to have it before the end of the year, before the end of 2013, to have the first service on-air. Tuning the equipment and then bringing it to the UK, setting up a site is only two days. It will be possible - we will see.