The market's choice for mission critical communications

By Kirsi Melvola, Manager of Operations&Services, and Dimitris Kanakidis, R&D Manager, Net Technologies

TETRA is a Professional Mobile Radio system and it is deployed in over 100 countries around the world. As the markets choice for Mission Critical Communications of today, is it suitable for your organizations needs?

Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) also known as Professional Mobiles Radio and Specialized Mobile Radio (SMR), are a reality in almost every part of the world nowadays. TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) is such a system and it is inevitably the markets choice for Mission Critical Communications of today. But how to define whether it is suitable for your organizations needs?

TETRA is a digital trunked radio system that can provide voice or data communications between PMR users. It is designed specifically for public safety professionals as well as professionals who need to communicate in groups. Good experiences have been gathered from around the globe in shared multi-agency TETRA networks, that have enabled cooperation’s deemed impossible earlier. Therefore, beyond the employment of the TETRA technology by police forces and fire brigade the TETRA network systems have drawn attention in transport as well as in commercial, governmental, military and oil & gas sectors. Countrywide Mission Critical Communications networks, such as VIRVE in Finland, have reported good results and improved communications and response from the users.

TETRA technology today claims a considerable share of the global PMR market, which was originally dominated by conventional analogue systems. Over 100 countries currently deploy a TETRA network in either public or private use, and the trend is still rapidly increasing. Although TETRA is the choice for a continuously growing number of companies around the globe, the key factor is still the user needs. The users of TETRA value the fact that TETRA is far more secure than the traditional PMR systems – an important feature in all Mission Critical Communications. The end-to-end secured voice and data transmissions offer all TETRA users much needed and asked for privacy and security. Other added value features in TETRA in comparison to the traditional PMR include supreme quality of voice, spectrum efficiency via TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access), priorities, dispatching and voice & data services for application usage; just to mention few.

Other key-features can be further identified: Whereas the traditional analogue systems provide high quality voice communication in high signal strength areas, the quality will gradually degrade down to poor voice quality in low RF signal strength areas. TETRA provides constant good quality voice communications throughout the coverage area independent of RF signal strength. Moreover, for the same occupied channel bandwidth, digital systems offer a higher data throughput than analogue systems that are primarily designed to carry voice communications. Also, Trunking, which is normally seen as spectrum efficiency brought about by the automatic and dynamic assignment of a small number of communication channels shared amongst a relatively large number of users of TETRA resolves several operational problems that conventional PMR systems exhibit, such as contention, manual channel selection, inefficient channel utilization, lack of privacy, and radio user abuse. The before mentioned features of TETRA act as enablers and offers mission critical users possibilities so far have only been dreamed of.

The above advantages and many other new services offered, such as Bandwidth on Demand, Concurrent Voice and Data, and Full duplex Voice Communications, make TETRA the most secure, as well as wanted choice for network technology in mission critical communications. And the plusses on the mission critical users mind keep on increasing. The data services today for TETRA application usage have already significant versatility, ranging from simple status services in real-time to IP packet data and Short Data Services, and more are being developed daily. Control room applications are further proving their value all over the world, and providing more key advantages to users, for example simultaneous view to different multimedia and other files from several different locations. This in simple terms means that certain user groups, such as the police, gain significant advantage when they are able to communicate, for example, images or multimedia, via a secured networks in real-time. In the control rooms, all the received information such as images, videos, voice recordings, CCTV camera views and reports can be imported to one database, where it can be played simultaneously, send to other users or optionally stored for further reference. All these features and possibilities offer a clear added value to the user organizations, and help in mission critical communications in a way that has been long longed for.

In our business as planners, operators and consultants, we face user organizations in the pivot-point of decision making daily. The decision-making is usually between if to use the readily available commercial networks or to deploy TETRA – a valid question. Our answer to our customers is in all cases: What are your users’ needs to your network? In this fast evolving environment, new TETRA Network deployments should compromise with two main factors. Cost of deployment and network efficiency that will provide solutions to all requirements set by the potential users. One of the vital procedures that have to be followed in order to reveal the optimum tradeoff between these two struggling aspects is the Radio Planning. Radio Planning is a procedure highly beneficial for the deployment of every TETRA network. Not only providing essential predictions on the performance of the under-design networks (coverage, traffic, interference), but offering decision makers the ability to compromise cost and performance requirements based upon realistic data. Therefore, it is a process that assists preserving an efficient cost control during the lifetime of a TETRA network project, from planning phase to actual network deployment.

For many user organizations today, TETRA technology has provided answers and added value, especially in the field of Mission Critical Communications. The markets have clearly chosen TETRA as the preferred communications technology in several industry sectors worldwide. The reasons are simple: The Deployment Cost is approximately the same component-wise, with great advantages of TETRA compared to analogue systems in terms of economies of scale, competition, and life cycle cost. To the markets, TETRA technology seems to be the solution to long-standing problems in security, availability and quality.