The rise of TETRA in Australia

The TETRA digital trunked radio standard has had a rapid rise in the local marketplace.

In late 2015, the Australian chapter of the international TETRA and Critical Communications Association (TCCA) altered its name to the Australasian TETRA and Critical Communications Forum (ATCCF) — a subtle change, but one that reflects the new reality of a communications world that now is about more than just two-way radio.

As the ATCCF is celebrating its 15th birthday this November, we thought the time was right to sit down with representatives of the organisation to find out why TETRA has been so successful, and where the technology is heading next.

Developing the standard

TETRA began life in the mid-1990s as public safety operators saw a need to introduce a digital trunked standard to replace the analog systems that were dominant at the time. The new system would need to have standardisation on encryption, security, data transfer, air interfaces and equipment interfacing at the subscriber level. It was decided that the standard would be based on 4-slot TDMA with 25 kHz channel spacing. Other advantages would be the inclusion of a direct mode and allowance for gateway and repeater mode capability.

“I think you’ve also got to take into account that a lot of the government and other mission-critical organisations really wanted a multivendor aspect as well,” said Anton Abrahams, chairman of the ATCCF. “Multiple vendors with interoperability would safeguard their new investments in their transition from analog to digital.”

“What those standards also did was open up the third-party product and application development around voice, data and security services,” said Kevin Graham, director of the ATCCF and managing director of Global Digital Solutions Consulting. “It’s opened up the opportunities for suppliers to provide value-add solutions and applications and the interconnection of peripheral data equipment to subscriber product. And it also opened up command and control and other subsystem development across a broader third-party industry.”

The local market

TETRA had a bit of a late start here in Australia.

“We were locked out of available spectrum pretty much until the mid-2000s,” said Graham. “It was primarily because the available radio spectrum access in Australia and New Zealand didn’t align to the international spectrum channel spacings. We had no 10 MHz channel spacing available; or if we did, it was fully encumbered in the high-density customer areas.

“The only other spectrum that was available that could comply was 800 MHz, but the 800 MHz development of product lagged the 380–470 MHz market, which was the much larger accessible market for the vendors than 800 MHz,” added Graham. “But once the 800 MHz TETRA products were developed, we were in a position to offer those systems in the region, and that was one factor why it took until the mid-2000s to win local projects.

“We had a lot of a support from within the ACMA to look at ways in which they could replan the UHF spectrum, which they were looking at doing anyway from the point of view of narrowbanding, band replanning and government spectrum harmonisation,” said Graham. “And essentially what’s happened since is that the UHF bands have been replanned and there’s alignment of spectrum matching internationally available TETRA products.”

While that process was happening, the ACMA allowed 450–470 MHz channels to be allocated in rural areas on a 10 MHz channel spacing. The 380–400 MHz segment wasn’t available in Australia and New Zealand because it was embargoed for defence. The other band, 403–420 MHz, didn’t have a 10 MHz spacing and suffered from problems of congestion — quite a few of the MPT 1327 trunk radio networks were positioned in that segment of the band, as were railway operators and others.

“Of course, Motorola introduced the Zeon digital public access network, which is based on the TETRA standard, and that was on 800 MHz where they had existing spectrum in the band,” said Abrahams. “Motorola and their partners have successfully migrated a diverse range of customers in local government, transport, security and construction to name a few.”

“There were also a lot of oil and gas companies that had analog trunking systems from various suppliers in 800 MHz, and they were obviously targets for migration as those systems reached end of life,” added Graham. “And they were the ones who were the catalyst for choosing TETRA in those implementations. There were a number of large primary customers who made that move, eg, Caltex, Shell and Rio Tinto.”

More room to grow

So given that TETRA has really only been around in Australia for about 10 years, has the ATCCF been surprised by the speed of the uptake?

“Given there is a still a lot of spectrum congestion in the major built-up areas, it’s been extremely successful,” said Graham. “Quite a few of the major customers were also embarking on similar programs within their organisations to standardise not just their radio systems, but their data networking, telephony and so on… and TETRA was one technology that came along that allowed them to provide a functionality to amalgamate those business operational requirements on one system and transition off ageing systems or obsolete technology.

“It was through these modernisation programs that BHP and Rio Tinto and Shell and the like had undertaken — not just here, but some of them globally — that they were really trying to harmonise their own business systems,” added Graham. “TETRA was one that was well-specced, open standard and multivendor and covered a broad suite of capabilities — they saw it as an insurance policy for the future if you like.”

Being vendor agnostic was another key selling point, said the ATCCF’s Doug Bowden.

“I think the uptake of TETRA has surprised a few people. But I think the vendor agnostic side of it, the functionality, and once those first reference sites were put in place and people could be see the benefits that could be gained from putting a TETRA system in, it just gained momentum and the momentum has been very good,” Bowden said. “Now we see TETRA operating in shopping complexes, hotel/casinos, universities, convention centres, manufacturing and transportation/rail and light rail in Australia.

So TETRA was really the right technology at the right time?

“Very much so,” said Graham. “And one of the other things that I think the customer community recognised — and it stemmed from the broadening of the vendor community — was that it instilled a lot more competitiveness, and therefore the price/feature benefit power curve and innovation was much more intensive.”

According to Bowden, who is also Sepura’s local business development manager, they’re selling terminals today at much the same price as five years ago, but with significantly greater functionality.

“Today, our customers are getting much more value for their money,” he said.

Even though TETRA has been exposed to the Australian communications market for a decade or so, are there still potential customers who are unaware of its merits?

“There are still potential customers out there who still don’t fully understand the possibilities of TETRA,” said Bowden. “There are some who are hoping to manage with their old existing analog legacy systems and thinking that they’ll skip a technology and jump straight into LTE, and unfortunately they don’t realise how long it’s going to take for PMR functionality to be standardised for LTE. For other standards, this process has taken about 10 years.”

With the mining and exploration sectors being traditional TETRA users, and with the downturn in those sectors, it might be thought that the technology is entering a wilderness period. Not so, according to the ATCCF, which sees lots of potential for more TETRA systems in Australia.

“There’s still a lot of investment going on,” said Abrahams, particularly in public transport. “Looking at the vital transport investments governments are going to be making all over Australia, I think there are opportunities in most of the states.”

The broadband future

Of course, the elephant (or maybe still just a calf) in the room of public safety communications is LTE and mobile broadband. Where will TETRA fit into this brave new world?

“LTE is still a long way away from having mission-critical PTT features as a standard product,” said Bowden. “[The PTT that’s out there] is currently all proprietary, but it’s not in standardised mission-critical form yet. It doesn’t give you encryption, it doesn’t give you your priorities.

“Some of our engineers went to one vendor’s presentation of an LTE PTT radio that had an emergency button on the top, and they asked, ‘What happens when the emergency button is pushed — does the call go straight through if the network’s busy?’ And they were told, ‘No, it’s queued like any other call’,” Bowden said. “So it’s a long way from giving you all the mission-critical functions that TETRA now gives.”

Yet everyone recognises that LTE is coming, and that standardisation of the mission-critical feature set will happen. The biggest barriers are the availability of spectrum, the availability of silicon to deliver this functionality and — last but not least — the cost versus benefit, which at the moment is significantly higher than that of a TETRA solution.

“Most of the vendors know that LTE is part of the future. We know that ultimately it will become a key future technology,” said Bowden. “So most vendors are developing products that will enable mission-critical to talk over LTE. They’re developing either PTT LTE products or they’re multibearer products that ultimately could have LTE inside.

“For the foreseeable future, mission-critical comms will be serviced by TETRA complemented by LTE, and this is a model that’s emerging throughout the world,” he added.

“I think it’s important to know that the TCCA, and we as the TCCA chapter in Australia, are very much involved in the future of radiocommunications through our involvement with ETSI and the 3GPP group, specifically with relation to driving the global development and the standardisation of critical mobile broadband functionality,” added Abrahams.

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The TCCC has released a series of ‘Insights’ — white papers, videos and podcasts — on how TETRA is benefiting a range of industry sectors. You can find them at bit.ly/2ed6gjM.

Images courtesy Sepura and Hytera.