Motorola has announced a range of new Tetra (Terrestrial Trunked Radio) mission-critical communications devices, ranging from a base station that runs on a methanol fuel cell to the world's smallest under-cover Tetra radio at the Tetra World Congress, held for the first time outside of Europe in Hong Kong.
In Europe the market for Tetra is almost entirely about "blue-light" services--police, fire brigade and ambulance services. However in Asia, the market is split roughly between public safety and industry, such as oil and gas, transportation and sporting events.
Trunked radio uses a central switch rather than traditional point to point. With multiple base stations, the system can scale up to cover wide areas or even entire cities or countries.
Motorola's vice-president for Europe, Middle-East and Africa for government and public safety John Gherghetta explained how, unlike GSM or WiMAX, Tetra was designed to be operational after earthquakes or bombings, in emergency situations where civilian networks had collapsed and had somewhere near ten times redundancy built into the protocol.
He also said that Motorola was working on a Bluetooth Tetra radio that would use a normal phone handset connected via Bluetooth to a Tetra device for its next generation of covert radio.
For all intents and purposes this would look like the operative was conducting a regular phone call when in fact he was talking on a secure, encrypted and disaster-proof network.
Today the industry has two standards for public safety radios, Tetra and APCO P25 and Motorola plays in both of these markets.
"Hong Kong has the most sophisticated policing system in the world and it is one of the most sophisticated cities in the world. It is more like an IT project rather than a policing project," Gherghetta said.
With the acquisition of Symbol, Motorola now has the expertise to provide more advanced Windows Mobile-based Tetra handsets as well as those which operate in conjunction with WiMAX, mesh Wi-Fi or even Motorola's proprietary Wi4 canopy system.
This means that a device can send or receive moving video over any wireless broadband network that is available, or if everything has collapsed, will seamlessly switch back to Tetra or the new Tetra 2 (Tetra Enhanced Data Service, or TEDS) which offers up to 512Kbps in a mission critical mode. Tetra offers only 28.8Kbps for each of its 25KHz channels.
Some countries, such as Germany, are now rolling out Tetra grids that cover the entire country and provide them as a shared service for multiple public safety organizations.
Chairman of the Tetra Association Phil Godfrey said that APAC was now the fastest growing region for Tetra with 98 percent growth over the last 12 months. The event has grown from an 80 delegate affair in Berlin 10 years ago to the current one, which expects over 25,000 attendees.
He also noted that a Tetra-based system had been selected to police the upcoming Olympics in Beijing. He said that many new products would be released over the next 12 to 18 months now that Tetra 2, or TEDS, would make many new higher data rate devices and applications possible.
Jolly Wong of the Hong Kong police said that Tetra had been selected as the technology of choice for Hong Kong's third generation command and control system.
The Hong Kong police force is also trialing wireless broadband solutions so they can evaluate the feasibility of high bandwidth multimedia broadband applications and is testing roaming between TEDS, Wi-Fi and WiMAX.
"What I can say from the broadband trials is that the police operating environment is changing. New challenges arise frequently and unexpectedly and we need innovation to come up with crime fighting tactics. Crime fighting has to leverage technology," he said.
The Ferrari Formula 1 team was also on hand to praise Tetra and how the device worked to deliver telemetry and provide two-way voice communications in the extremely harsh environment of an F1 car.
General manager for Motorola in Asia-Pacific Teck Moh Phey said that the Asia-Pacific region had two important markets, the high growth markets of China, India and Vietnam which has a huge gap in terms of the amount of communications available versus the amount they actually need.
Next there were the sophisticated markets of Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia which saw government pushing for more and more advanced services.
Asked about the future and software defined radio, Phey said that Motorola was not pursuing this technology as the need to provide mission critical devices to change and be customized is not needed in this market segment.
"It's like washing machines with tumble dryers. If you combine the two you don't optimize either. We do have people looking at software-defined radio, but we do not see that evolving over the next couple of years," he said.
On frequencies used, while Thailand has long used 800MHz for public safety networks, many enterprises use 400MHz while China is on 350MHz, and India is considering using the same.
He said that technically there was little difference and it is more a regulatory decision as to which band is used.
Tetra, being fully digital, also has many levels of encryption and key management schemes.
This means that even if a handheld is lost, it can be killed and the security of the system is not compromised.
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