The TETRA Association has become the TETRA + Critical Communications Association. Phil Godfrey, its chairman, talks to TETRA TODAY about the thinking behind the change of name and his vision of the association’s expanded mission

The mobile communications market is going through some fairly significant changes, prompted largely by the huge increase in the use of smartphones and tablet computers. And that is generating a very high interest in mobile broadband. 

It is not unreasonable to expect that people in the critical communications business – people like public safety – would expect to be able to do with their professional communications network what they can already do with their own smartphones. So the TETRA Association has been considering how to address the changes which are taking place – and how to make sure that it continues to meet the needs of the users of critical communications.

TETRA has been a phenomenal success around the world as a voice service, and is now in 125 countries. It was specifically designed to meet the needs of critical communications users for voice services. But it hasn’t kept up to date with the increasing uses of data.

We have enhanced TETRA in TETRA Release 2 with the introduction of TEDS, which provides critical communications data up to, typically, 150–200?kbit/s, and we believe that will be very important for the next few years. But we need to make sure that we have a strategy for the future which provides broadband services as well.

Broadening the scope

The board of the TETRA Association has decided that it is appropriate for us to broaden the scope of the association so that it is not just looking at TETRA voice and TETRA data services but is able to look forward to other, emerging technologies. Mobile broadband is probably the most important one of those in the short term. And so for that reason, we have decided to change the name of the organization to become the TETRA + Critical Communications Association – and thereby give us the ability to address more than just TETRA.

Now, the most important thing that I need to make clear is that that doesn’t mean that there will be any less focus on TETRA. That is certainly not the case. We believe that TETRA will be the primary, most important technology for voice services for at least 10 years to come.

We don’t see anything on the horizon that is likely to replace TETRA, or indeed TEDS critical data, for at least 10 years. And therefore we will continue to do all the same things that we are currently doing – in particular, supporting the IOP [interoperability] process, continuing to run TETRA events and all the activities that we currently do. What we’re simply going to do is to expand our activities and look at other solutions that will enhance TETRA’s capabilities.

I wouldn’t see it so much as a change of direction, just a broader direction. We will continue to address the same types of user. When I talk about the critical communications user, I’m talking about, obviously, the ‘blue light’ services, but also those who are responsible for critical national infrastructure, such as electricity, gas, water, transportation, fuel and power – all these sorts of things – who are already users of TETRA and will continue to be users of TETRA.

All of those sorts of organizations are looking towards the future themselves, and how they can use broadband data to make themselves more efficient. We want to make sure that we encourage the development of standards and solutions that will meet those sorts of needs.

Outside the footprint

Is this a change that has been demanded by your members?

Absolutely. In particular, some of the operators of European public safety networks are themselves saying that we need to provide enhanced data services for our users, and how do we do that? And where will we find broadband data capability that will meet their needs? The obvious answer to that is – well, just go and buy services from the public cellular operators.

But whilst that made seem obvious on the surface, once you start to delve down into it, you discover that there are many quite serious limitations with the public cellular operators – not the least of which is that they only provide coverage in the areas where they can make a good return. So you will probably get good consumer broadband coverage so long as you are in a metropolitan area or an urban area, but once you start to move outside of that, it all disappears.

But that’s no good for people like the police, fire and ambulance, who can’t guarantee that crashes on the motorway will be within the coverage of a consumer broadband network. If there’s a train crash, it will almost certainly be out in the country somewhere, where there is no coverage.
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