As one of the longest-established TETRA operators, Astrid showcased once again its depth of experience. “I think we started together with the Netherlands and UK and Finland”, said Daniël Haché, director for external relations. “We were the four pioneers in the TETRA world.

“What was rather different with Astrid is that we started immediately not only with a TETRA network but we did an integration with a paging network and also with dispatching centres. Since 1998 we have had as an objective to give our security personnel in the field an integrated solution for dispatching, paging and TETRA for radio.

“We started really to be operational in 2003. We have not only security services but also some private companies which are related to what is security in general – like gas companies, electricity companies, railways, Metro – they also can connect themselves to the Astrid network. So altogether we have now 60 000 devices in the field. 

“We have 11 dispatching centres, which are mainly for police. Three of those 11 are also integrated with medical and fire services on the same technology platform. And there is a Project 112 that says that we will have to integrate all 11 dispatching centres with the other services – medical and fire services. 

“And then we have our paging network – that’s the beepers. That’s because the firemen don’t want to use big radios. We work a lot with volunteers in Belgium, volunteer firemen. To call them out, they don’t want to have a radio because it is expensive and because you don’t go into a restaurant with something like this. You need something really small so if you have a call, ‘Go to the depot, be ready’ – that’s why they use the paging network.”

At present, M. Haché says, the pagers operate on an analogue Pocsag network. Astrid has not yet been persuaded to move to the new TETRA pocket-sized pagers.

Refreshing the network

“We have about 500 base stations”, he continues, “but the network is never complete. We are still busy with some extra base stations, extra antennas, some repeaters, indoor coverage. The most important remark from our user community is that there isn’t enough coverage. They are never happy with the coverage! They want indoor coverage all over the country, everywhere, which is impossible to do. If we implemented indoor coverage everywhere, we would have 1500–2000 base stations, something that our government cannot pay for. But there is always some comment, ‘There wasn’t coverage inside one supermarket or another’. That’s [the same] everywhere, I suppose.”

Nonetheless, the network is always in evolution. “We have just finished internally, in Astrid, a new business plan with a lot of objectives in it. It’s now for discussion on the table of the government, so in the next months, I suppose, we will have that discussion. It will not be a very easy discussion because Belgium, like other European countries, is being confronted with budgetary restraints, so that will be a difficult one. 

“But what we foresee in the business plan is first of all a renewal of most of the hardware and infrastructure; also software, because we have been busy with the network for 10 years now, so we have to prepare ourselves to renew it – we have to change to new base stations, new links between the base stations and the switches. Everything should be renewed in the coming years, if we have the budget – and I suppose we will have the budget.

Moving towards broadband

“And then another very important objective is that we want to start mobile data. I’m also very active in the TCCA, so I want to drive the whole TETRA community forward, and not only the TETRA community but the whole critical communications community towards a new mobile data future.

“We still are hesitating because LTE is still too far away, so it isn’t in this business plan yet – but in our business plan is an MVNO [mobile virtual network operator] solution. We are going to start with the commercial operators, buy some capacity from them with some sort of priority and some sort of agreements between the operators, and deliver that as a service to our user community.
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