A standard process

Phil Kidner fills EU Infrastructure in on the background of the TETRA standard and the recent advancements in the communications space.

“The TETRA standard has been specifically developed to meet the needs of a wide variety of user organisations”
-Phil Kidner

Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) is a digital trunked mobile radio standard developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) with the purpose of meeting the needs of traditional Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) user organizations. What this means is that air interfaces, network interfaces, as well as services and facilities, are specified in sufficient detail to enable independent manufacturers to develop infrastructure and radio terminal products that are fully interoperable with each other. In other words, radio terminals from different manufacturers can operate on infrastructures created by other manufacturers. This ability of full interoperability is a distinct advantage of the open standards developed by ETSI. And, as several independent manufacturers support the TETRA standard, this increases competition, provides second source security and allows a greater choice of terminal products for specific user applications.

What’s more, as the TETRA standard has been specifically developed to meet the needs of a wide variety of traditional PMR user organisations, it has a scaleable architecture allowing economic network deployments. Therefore, besides meeting the needs of traditional PMR user organisations, the TETRA standard has also been developed to meet the needs of Public Access Mobile Radio (PAMR) operators.

Essentially though, the TETRA standard is the communications standard for people that work in groups. It is for mission-critical, business-critical users, and it's a standard that seeks to be a robust technology. When it was created we were working in the analogue world, and TETRA was marked as the first digital trunked technology for these users. Created in the early 1990s, TETRA has now spread to, at the last count, 106 countries around the world.

The original TETRA standard first envisaged by ETSI was known as the TETRA Voice plus Data (V+D) standard.  Because of the need to further evolve and enhance TETRA, there needed to be some additional benefits made to the original V+D standard, which is now known as TETRA Release 1. After identifying what advancement were necessary TETRA Release 2 (TETRA 2) was standardized.

TETRA 2 included things like vocoder and the extension of range, but was primarily about improved data-rates. Everything we do goes through an interoperability process so that when manufacturers are creating TETRA 2 products (or TEDS, Tetra Enhanced Data Service products), the users have confidence that the products from different manufacturers will interoperate. All the interoperation processes for TETRA 2 are now written and ready, we’re just waiting for the products; the first of which are being rolled-out later this year. In addition, next year there’s two notable contracts around the world that will see some of the first TEDS products: first in Norway with the Nordnet Network, and then a system in Johannesburg for their police force, which will coincide with the World Cup in South Africa.

All of this is part of the process of keeping TETRA up to date in the here and now, and we’re also looking to the future and keeping TETRA up to date in the future, and whether that’s either through broadband TETRA or through interfacing with some other technologies like LTE (Long Term Evolution) we, as an association, are encouraging ETSI to do that standardisation process.

The evolution of TETRA
We are now talking about the next evolution of TETRA, and whether it’s called TETRA Release 3 or not is just a detail, but ESTI have begun work on that standard. We’re not being complacent; we’re trying to keep TETRA as up to date as possible.

As TETRA is designed for people that work in groups, that obviously includes public safety, police officers, ambulance and fire, but it also involves people that work in utilities, people that work in oil & gas, and people that work in transport. In fact, the biggest sector in numbers of networks now is probably in transport. All the airports and metros in Asia, for instance, are going TETRA. And TETRA offers these organisations a digital trunk radio with extremely clear voice capabilities, it offers secure communications over the air interface, it can be encrypted, it is built to public safety standards and the equipment is very tough and robust. TETRA is both voice and data, so through voice it covers group calls, point-to-point calls and telephony calls through a gateway; and through data, its data rates cover the very small bits for updating positions and locations, right through to sending pictures. Then the TETRA 2 standard is an enhancement of that data, making a better use of it.

At the TETRA association, we really do two things. Oftentimes we are described as the marketing arm of ETSI, but that really doesn’t do justice to everything we do. One of the things we do that’s very important is manage the interoperability process. So TETRA signifies the first time in the PMR world that interoperability has ever been thought of or implemented, and we now have about 20 TETRA manufacturers who participated in IOP testing. If you take the UK as an example, the UK has the Motorola network, which supports terminals from Motorola, from EADS, from Sepura, from Selex, from Cleartone and from lots of different manufacturers and what that has meant is that it has created a market that manufacturers want to be involved in, because they see it going global.

The other side of it is that for the users. All that competition means that the price of the product is driven down, which is clearly a strong incentive to buy it.

The other thing that we do through the Association is we market TETRA. For example the Associate has set-up events across the globe and we put on conferences and exhibitions to demonstrate what TETRA can do for organisations.

Take the TETRA World Congress, for example, this year held in Munich, Germany, back in May. The TETRA World Congress is the flagship event of the TETRA community, and in Munich we exceeding all of our expectations once again, with the number of registrations is greater than we have seen anywhere before. In fact, there was in excess of 2500 attendees in Munich and we are now anticipating that number to grow again in Singapore, which is where the new World Congress will be held in 2010.

Phil Kidner is Chief Executive of the TETRA Association, which he has been involved with the last three years.

New Releases

A closer look at the need for the TETRA Release 2
While TETRA Release 1 already offered a very comprehensive portfolio of services and facilities, as time progresses there became a need to evolve and enhance the technologies to better satisfy user requirements, futureproof investments and ensure longevity. Like GSM moving to GPRS, EDGE and UMTS/3G, TETRA also needed to evolve to satisfy increasing user demand for new services and facilities, as well as gleaning the benefits of new technology.
As early as 1999, interest groups comprising both users and manufacturers within Technical Committee (TC) TETRA and the TETRA Association identified the need to enhance TETRA in several areas. Although the initial number of areas identified were very comprehensive, significant events in the telecommunications industry, combined with changing market needs, resulted in the several services and facilities being standardised at the end of 2005 as part of TETRA Release 2. These included Trunked Mode Operation (TMO) Range Extension; Adaptive Multiple Rate (AMR) Voice Codec; Mixed Excitation Liner Predictive, enhanced (MELPe) Voice Codec; and TETRA Enhanced Data Service (TEDS).