“A few years ago people thought TETRA was fighting P25 and so on. There is competition, which is good for everybody – but with this broadband initiative, everyone is working together.”

Control room strategies

The final session of the conference began with a return to last year’s summer riots in the UK, with Martin Benke, director of UK network services at TETRA network operator Airwave Solutions. During this episode, traffic on the network effectively doubled overnight and it remained at an elevated level throughout the week, even after law and order had been restored.

“We had a march from the English Defence League, a right-wing organization, which met the Union Against Fascism in east London”, Mr Benke said. “Fortunately, law and order was maintained, but there were a lot of police there. In fact, we had our busiest time ever on a single site – we had almost 2300 officers attached to a single base station.”

Asked by a delegate what lessons were learnt from the experience, Mr Benke continued: “ You can look at the network, you can look at the statistics, you can look at the performance and it all looks green and rosy. But you can speak to the officer on the street and he might have a different perception.

“The more we can do to explain to people on the street how they can get the best out of the Airwave service, the better chance they have of getting a great customer experience.

“For example, we have the Olympics coming up, which will be exactly the same as the riots, with officers coming from across the country to support the Met [London’s Metropolitan Police]. They’re all coming in to three feeding stations.

“What we’re doing, with support from Motorola, is having staff at those centres to make sure those officers understand exactly how to get the most from the radio.”

Staying in control

A closing panel discussion, chaired by Peter Prater from Frequentis, looked at the future of control rooms and brought back to the stage Peter Goulding and Geoff McCormick along with Kari Junttila.

Mr McCormick began with his vision of future crowd control at a football match. “Imagine a future where every single ticket emits a signal so you know where all the tickets are”, he said. “Imagine if you combine that with the local pubs to see where the most beer is being sold. Imagine if you can integrate new forms of data so you can predict things much more accurately.”

Mr Junttila outlined practice in Finland where incidents are always controlled out in the field. This led to the final question of the day: will we need fixed control rooms in the future?

“The idea that when you call 999 and you’ll be speaking to a human in the future, I don’t think is a given”, Mr McCormick commented. “There will be automatic call-forwarding based on tonality of voice, a speech recognition type of activity. We are living in exponential times and there’s massive change afoot.”

But Mr Goulding was sceptical. He gave the example of the Metropolitan Police, which has 10?000 incidents coming into the control room on any given Saturday.

Summing up, Mr Prater said: “We are in the process of ripping up the rule book and starting again. I put it to you that at next years event in Paris you might start hearing more news on these mobile control facilities.”

Business move

In terms of business developments at the show, Sepura’s acquisition of 3T Communications, the Austrian manufacturer of TETRA infrastructure, highlighted a significant shift in strategy for a company hitherto associated with handsets and applications. 3T Communications’ speciality has been in small to mid-size TETRA systems predominantly for customers in the commercial sector and Sepura sees this business segment growing strongly as the worldwide TETRA market develops beyond its public safety origins to include sectors such as the chemical industries, oil and gas and utilities.

Sepura also used the congress to celebrate the delivery of its one-millionth radio, in a geographically appropriate context – an STP8000 for its customer the Qatar Ministry of Interior. Gordon Watling, chief executive of Sepura said: “We delivered our 500?000th radio in 2008 and it’s a remarkable milestone, given the considerably shorter time it’s taken for us to deliver the second 500?000th radio, demonstrating our impressive levels of growth”.

New for the show from Sepura was the STP9000 range, a family of three handportables which combines ‘tough’ technologies developed for the company’s recent ATEX radio with a new, intuitive user interface (there is a ‘compatibility mode’ for existing Sepura users). It also has some ‘smart’ extras such as haptic (touch) feedback to help users wearing gloves, and a built-in RFID tag for applications such as tracking individual radios in a fleet. The STP9000 is submersible, but Sepura adds that it has been tested well beyond its IP67 rating and can survive for an hour under two metres of water. The connectors are protected even against salt water.
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