SITA today announced that it is entering the professional mobile radio market after signing a deal with Germany's third largest airport, Düsseldorf, to deploy a new radio network for 1,200 users in a ten-year $7.8 million deal.
The deal marks a further strengthening of cooperation between SITA and Düsseldorf following a CUTE check-in renewal earlier this year for almost 350 workstations. Although SITA is involved in an outsourcing joint venture for IT at Düsseldorf, the selection of suppliers is totally independent from SITA.
Thomas Schnalke, Managing Director of Düsseldorf Airport, said: "SITA's Professional Mobile Radio is the best private mobile voice solution for airports currently on the market. The capacity of SITA to offer an integrated and managed service suits our needs perfectly, as do the enhanced security and safety features of the system."
Explaining why SITA has entered this market, Ilya Gutlin, SITA Regional Vice President, said: "Most airports still have legacy systems with basic speech functionality. SITA has developed a Professional Mobile Radio solution based on IP technology, combined with Java-enabled hand-portables.
"The system allows the creation and deployment of air transport specific applications like flight-oriented dialling, the provision of emergency calls from airport mass transport links, flight information queries from airport databases or FIDS (flight information display systems), and many other features that enhance operations at airports. SITA's exclusive focus on air transport and our knowledge and experience of the mission critical applications at airports makes us uniquely qualified to support this."
Full deployment of the system will take several months and will provide the Professional Mobile Radio service to more than 1,200 users.
Some other key benefits include integrity of the radio coverage by constantly checking the radio-links; protection against eavesdropping due to the "signal coding"; and scheduled or ad hoc security programmes and instructions that can be transmitted quickly and efficiently. The RFID-based Guard Control System, which will be used at Düsseldorf, is an application which requires security guards to "swipe" an RFID tag on pre-defined patrol routes using the hand portable. It ensures that guards are following their routes as a supervisor is alerted if any deviations are made.
SITA's Professional Mobile Radio solution can also be integrated with the existing Airport PBX or with SITA Voice Exchange for off-net calling.
Flight-oriented dialling enables the set-up of a temporary group based around the flight number which allows rapid and dynamic communications to all members. This feature contributes to reduction of the turnaround time of an aircraft.