Jeppe Jepsen, Director of International Business Relations, Motorola, scans the most significant developments of the past year and looks forward to the year ahead, as the standard and customer base develops.
The last twelve months have seen fantastic development in the TETRA market for two significant reasons. First, and most significantly, all of the participants in the market are working towards true interoperability through open standards. This has its roots in practical requirements of the users of the technology.
As part of the Schengen Treaty which allows for common EU immigration policies across 26 countries, borders have been opened up, meaning that people and goods can move more freely from country to country.
This impacts the policing and border control across Europe as public safety agencies in one country need to rely on the same effective tools in neighbouring countries: interoperability is the key. Motorola is continuously committed to open standards in TETRA. This drive towards open standards is exemplified by EADS’ acquisition of Nokia’s TETRA business.
The EUR90m investment made by EADS shows that it has accepted that it can’t meet business requirements without working towards open standards for true interoperability.
Looking to the future, TETRA 2 is being finalised as the next standard, and part of its development will be to ensure that it is backward-compatible to integrate with existing systems. There will, of course, be challenges ahead.
The development of new technologies will always attract the attention of the very same people that use TETRA. Motorola’s MESH technology, Wi-Max and Wi-Fi are all standards that are emerging and being increasingly adopted for use in the public safety market that traditionally uses TETRA.
The important thing is that these technologies and TETRA standards are developed to be interoperable with one another. We at Motorola have already led projects combining these technologies in tandem, and are working with customers to develop new services in the future.
Away from the public safety market, we’ll see a trend towards further adoption of TETRA in the transport sector — primarily in airport and metro systems. Motorola is already seeing growth in this market, having recently announced contracts with Kazan Metro in Russia, Danish State Railways, Beijing Urban Rail in China, and Zagreb Transport in Croatia.