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Interim solutions On that, Motorola’s Jeppe Jepsen was agreed. He said: “We are convinced that the right place to put broadband TETRA is either at 700?MHz, close to commercial networks so that we have the benefit of roaming on to commercial networks, or together with the military, if they will allow us. Which is clearly what many people in the European Commission and the European Parliament think should happen.” However, his colleague Jason Johur warned that delays in releasing any new bands would make interim broadband solutions inevitable. “Because the timeline of this is a number of years away”, he said, “there will be a gap. And the gap will basically involve commercial carriers as part of the solution. “It’s already happening today. What we’re saying is that it will probably continue for a period of time. It’s not ideal, but it will be part of the solution.” Mr Johur also warned against underestimating the amount of spectrum likely to be needed by PPDR forces when mobile video has become part of the routine. He outlined a scenario evaluated by Motorola in the US, of a hostage-taking incident lasting several hours. Numerous teams of officers would be involved in such a siege, together with fire service and emergency medical crews. During the forced entry, up to five officers in each team would stream low-resolution video feeds. Showing some charts, Mr Johur said: “In terms of the downlink, for the vast majority of the incident the requirement is well in excess of 5+5?MHz. And actually, at the point of entry into the building, you can see that that is beginning to approach 10+10?MHz. “On the uplink, where all the video streams are coming into the control room, it’s a different situation. Again, 5+5?MHz is needed by the vast majority of steps in the scenario, and as you get to the point of entry, then this exceeds the 10+10 requirement. This is partly the reason, in the US, where 5+5 has already been secured, that there’s a big push to get another 5+5.” He pointed out that these figures represented a single incident, yet other incidents were likely to be in progress at the same time. Finding spectrum In a discussion session later, Mr Jepsen returned to the business case for broadband. For mission-critical services, this would be driven by video, the most demanding network application. “If you take that aside, then TEDS can deliver it all”, he said. “So the question is the business case for video. “The users, the public safety community that I am in, are convinced that a disaster will happen, and when disasters happen the political world will change their minds. That’s how pretty much all of the TETRA systems across Europe have been funded. “The spectrum regulators are saying, ‘We don’t believe you, you will not get the money so therefore you’re not going to get the spectrum’. And there’s only one way to convince people differently, and that is to do a proper business case where you actually prove what it costs to society to accept x amount of lives, deaths, x amount of invalids for the rest of their life.” Picking up this point, Adrian Grilli, of the European Utilities Telecom Council, said: “We’ve just published a report, which is on the EUTC website, on the socioeconomic case for allocating spectrum to the electricity sector. It can be quite difficult and emotional to deal with the issue of how many lives are saved, and also quite contentious. “So, to avoid the passionate argument about lives saved, are there other socioeconomic, particularly economic, arguments that say that if a fire brigade can deal with a fire more quickly and save half the value of the property that would be otherwise destroyed by the fire, or if medical staff can get to the scene and deal with the incident more efficiently because they’ve got a video link, what is the economic benefit of that? – and then put the lives saved in a separate compartment.” TEDS or no TEDS Returning to TEDS, Phil Godfrey observed: “Interestingly, all three of the traditional TETRA manufacturers have said that TEDS is very much a part of their future portfolio and it will deliver a significant amount of functionality in terms of data; not video, but a lot of other stuff that it can do. Now, I suspect that there’s been a feeling in the user community that there hasn’t really been a commitment from the industry to TEDS. “So, is it of interest? Do you believe that that is something you will take away from here, and maybe we should be thinking a bit more seriously about TEDS?” From the audience, a Dutch police officer called: “In Holland, we are looking at LTE. We don’t go for TEDS any more.” A second voice added: “Same in Belgium.”
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