“The device itself has got a fully-integrated, ruggedized body and it is shockproof, and it has shock protection to the hard disk drive as well. And it converts into a tablet. But the keyboard and the tablet are spillproof, so you can spill Coca-Cola on it and it’ll be fine.”

Solution partners

TETRAtab’s concept is that it will continue to offer a machine in each of its device classes, to reassure buyers that a replacement machine suitable for their application will exist, even if the exact model they use has become unobtainable.

The company is supporting these products through a panel of application partners across Europe, who offer TETRA-based solutions ranging from automatic mumberplate recognition to asset-tracking. And with software and devices now readily available, it believes that TETRA data applications can now take off, helped along by the general growth in TETRA around the world. At the same time, growing sales will make the technology more affordable.

“If you have a network, people will use it, and people will use it for voice and people will use it for data”, Mr Lovelace said. “But you have to do the ‘field of dreams’ things. You actually have to put the devices there, and then the people will come. You can’t expect them to take on the technology without providing that technology.”

And this, he believes, will be the problem with TEDS. “People are a bit concerned about TEDS uptake”, he says. “What is there for people to take up? People have got to do speculative investments at quite a high level to think that TEDS is going to be a future.”

TETRA smartphones

Yet at the same time, users have been distracted by their increasing reliance on 3G networks for their mobile computers. “A little bit of a Holy Grail is desktop replication on TETRA”, he continued. “That’s not going to be possible.

“But the reason why that’s a Holy Grail is because the 3G networks aren’t available. The 3G networks drop off. I can vouch from several user experiences that, in Germany, if you are on a motorway between two conurbations, the best you get is 2½G – and as soon as a road traffic accident happens, which it inevitably does, then it’s gone.”

Meanwhile, Rob Lovelace argues that there is much that can be done with the existing TETRA networks.

“TETRA has gone from whacking great big TETRA radios to smaller and more dinky radios which are more usable, to TETRA modems like we used to have when we went on to the Internet . And now we are on to TETRA-enabled devices which are sort of like smartphones.

“The long-term future is TEDS – but that’s not the prevailing network now. So it’s like saying, ‘I won’t buy that WAP phone because in five years time it’s going to be a smartphone’. Yes – but what are you going to do between now and five years’ time? You still need that information.”

SUCCESS WITH SDS AND WML

Two or three years ago, people weren’t really sure if TETRA was an appropriate carrier for data”, says Rob Lovelace, of TETRAtab. “People are worried: they look at the bandwidth and go, ‘Well, yeah, it’s really low bandwidth’. But in fact that is not the issue, at the end of the day.

“Most of the applications that have been successful across Europe use SDS as their data channel. And the reason why is because you get a millisecond response over SDS.

“Once you have said, ‘I would like to know information about this object’, you get the first bit of information and a number of characters come down in a few milliseconds. By the time you’ve read that, the other ones have come down. It’s like the shutter board on a railway station. So by the time you’ve got to where you need to read, it’s down.

“The reason why people are stuck over this bandwidth issue is because a lot of programs are written in that particular way – because the designers have had the luxury of big bandwidth and they are unwilling to cut it down.

“An alternative is using a WML page – in other words, using WAP technology. It gives you a perfectly good user experience when it counts, and that’s the crucial thing. If you are in a serious situation and you need some information, then there’s WAP technology, which was perfectly good in its day, and it’s perfectly good now... versus nothing at all!”