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What challenges does TETRA face in the next 12 months? Firstly, I think clarifying the confusion over the broadband future. I think the community is looking for answers on how this is going to evolve and how they should proceed. Everybody knows it’s going to be there and everybody knows its not going to be the current TETRA. Hopefully we can clarify this, as at the moment there is not a clear vision. Is the development of TETRA applications meeting the needs of users? Yes and no. Certainly all the application providers are working to fulfill the user requirements. Vendors are quite skilled in satisfying the needs of these users. All application development is restricted by the data limitations of TETRA, so we living in that cage. I think that at the moment there are the de facto applications like AVLS that every organization needs. They all need to know where their units are and manage their everyday work. These applications they need now, and they have them now, but these applications are limited by the capabilities of TETRA. Users can live with what there is now, but it is a compromise. We have become very clever in going around the limitations of TETRA and understanding the limitations. TEDS alone for some organizations will change the game completely and many organizations are using commercial data, 3G and so on. Some organizations are hesitating to build mission-critical applications without having that backup solution that will work in any case. It’s slowly getting better and we eventually expect this problem to go away completely. How well can TETRA meet the growing demand for mobile data? The current TETRA standard has well-identified limitations. You can use it for data applications and we’re using it a lot for data needs. The limitations are defining what you can do and what’s not feasible. With TEDS, everything that doesn’t require live video you can quite nicely do already – it’s approaching GPR- level data speeds. How do you see the prospects for TEDS rollout? For each organization it’s a different question. Basically it’s a question of how lucky you are. If you have deployed your network early and haven’t operated in the right way, TEDS would mean replacing all your base stations and that really is not going to happen. In places where you are in the right phase it’s only a software upgrade and that’s another question. It depends on where you are and what you already have. In my opinion, the vendors should consider the compromise between what’s the price of upgrading the network and how much money they could make in selling TEDS terminals. If the cost of upgrading the infrastructure is the thing, then look at the whole picture and try to find a way. It’s case by case and I don’t expect mass deployment. Many networks will skip it and I would say the lucky ones are the ones who are forced to get it. How do you view the moves towards adding broadband wireless capabilities to TETRA? This question has been going around for a while and I think that what the TCCA did last year, changing from the TETRA Association, was extremely well timed. It was not too early, they identified this discussion was getting out of hand and we are going to have to make a statement. And that’s helping everybody to clarify the position. How realistic is the proposed LTE solution and, furthermore, do you believe it will be ready in time? ‘In time’ is always a relative term. I’m personally a great fan of LTE so I don’t see any technical limitations. Of course there is a lot to specify but if you take the TETRA user spec and say that we are going to run this on top of an LTE pipe, there are a couple of technical question marks but otherwise it’s completely feasible. The problem is, it will take years and years for any standardized solution to come, so I would expect people will start deploying different types of LTE-based broadband solutions. I think we’re going to see within the next few years a variety of different types of solutions, interim solutions and if people see that a dedicated LTE network is coming then they will start building services on top of commercial services. For the users it’s always too late, but it will come in time for the industry and we’ll have to see what happens in the meantime. The world is changing all the time. The standard is trying to catch up with the reality.
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