Digital diversity in the Australian comms landscape

We speak with Vertel's Andrew Findlay to find out how the company's DMR network is going, and where technology is heading next.

Earlier this year, Vertel announced plans to establish a national DMR network to complement its MPT and fixed wireless Carrier Ethernet access and WAN offerings. We recently sat down with Andrew Findlay, the company's executive director, to see what the market reaction has been, and also to dig into some related issues such as networking, infrastructure sharing, security and the convergence of comms and IT.

CC: You launched your DMR network earlier this year. How's it been going?

AF: We've really been focusing on the upgrade to and transition from our national MPT analog network to a DMR Tier 3 offering, which has been going smoothly. We've done about half of our sites in each of the geographies.

In the domain of our larger customers we're trying to articulate the fact that now it's digital… just another IP stream… there's the ability to make these networks talk to other fixed and mobile networks. We are positioning the digital network with some of our larger LMR customers like Holcim and Boral as something that can interoperate with their dispatch consoles, their job booking systems, their OHS technologies and their broader fixed network. We can also integrate with other standalone or third-party provided mobile services. The final piece of the puzzle is to look at how the push to talk over cellular and Wireless LAN offerings are going to be integrated with our overall LMR service offering.

CC: What was it that drove you to introduce DMR?

AF: Some of our bigger customers have been on our national MPT 1327 network for more than 10 years. They had got to the stage where their overall hardware needed refreshing. Most have implemented some sort of 3G/4G based mobile data service to improve their operational efficiency but they understand the value of having an alternate voice and niche data service that is independent of the public mobile services. We know that the issues around occupational health and safety are major drivers for them, keeping a separate voice component on their radio network, but it has to work well with their other communications. Our smaller customers with 20, 30 or 40 subscriber units are the ones that are thinking that the question is an 'either/or' when looking at LMR and 3G/4G.

CC: Are there any customers who would want DMR just for data?

AF: DMR is more suited to low-speed data as opposed to what the mobile carriers offer. Applications such as location-based services and real-time reporting are, in our opinion, much better suited to run over a 3G/4G network. Where we're really focused on the data component to it is in really low-speed but critical messages — we're even looking at, potentially, once we get a certain network coverage, might it be an option to go to some of the state GRNs to say, “Look, we know that some of your ambulances or police cars have multiple network connections, could this be another one of those connections?"

TAIT, who is our technology partner, has a value-add to DMR called GridLink, and they've rolled that out successfully in the US for a couple of big water and electricity utilities. As we go through and target some of the local councils to upgrade their networks from analog to digital we are saying, “This network can also handle what were previously separate SCADA and telemetry requirements." If we can handle both voice and SCADA use cases on the same network then we're starting to see some interesting business cases for a council that is undecided about its LMR future.

CC: What do councils see are the benefits of new comms solutions?

AF: Councils have a number of radio sites and water towers that they're currently using in their networks. But for them to go and build the backhaul between all those sites… we're saying, look, rather than putting in a low-speed, 900 MHz link between those sites, we're willing to put in a high-capacity microwave link so you get the carrier-grade backbone between all of your network sites. But then we can use that same network to start to provide our own fixed services to address nbn or Telstra blackspots in terms of fixed coverage.

But also, our view is that once we've got that carrier-grade layer network in and across your region, we can start offering other services including Wi-Fi, some CCTV, etc. We're even seeing some of the councils that are saying, “Could we start to look at sharing some of our core infrastructure and telephony and conferencing services?" So we're trying to really get the story out there to say when you can start layering these different technologies and different access systems on top of one common infrastructure, you've got some really interesting commercial and technical possibilities.

We've taken the ACMA database and done a full analysis of what bases are on what sites with what links, and we are really quite interested to see that there isn't a lot of interoperability and/or resilience in these networks. So we're going to councils and saying, apart from getting these services at better quality and at a better price point, we can start now to show that by you being involved in these infrastructure builds, [that] you can be proactive in adding some resilience to your networks and your regions.

CC: What're your thoughts on the industry eventually moving to LTE?

AF: We've got a couple of different vendors in our lab at the moment for the push to talk over cellular (PoC) option, and we really do see that the smaller end of the market — the 10–30 vehicles — are the ones who are really suited to going to this technology and service. And whether they do that in exclusion to radio or whether they still have a radio and a PTT client… our overall pitch is that we want to bundle the two together. You can actually have the benefits of both in an affordable package. So we're now just crafting that offer together, and we're just working out technically how we do that.

CC: How are general IT trends affecting this sector and your business?

AF: In the fixed space you have SDN and NFV starting to shake things up. But in the mobile world everyone's talking about Cloud-RAN. That's where you have an industrial server sitting on a site with redundant power, and it's got a number of protocol stacks sitting up there [from which] you could offer some sort of 'any channel on demand' service.

One of the real barriers to Cloud-RAN in the 3G/4G space is the latency and the amount of capacity you need in that fronthaul part of the network. By virtue of the fact that PTT already has the half-duplex and call set-up delay built into it, the actual latency doesn't really count. The concept would be to have a QoS-enabled Ethernet connected site and a virtual base station that allocates a channel on a certain frequency on a certain protocol and through a custom antenna system. How that plays out with the incumbent vendors like TAIT and challengers like Etherstack will be interesting to see.

CC: From a public sector perspective, are networking issues on the radar or are they hidden away?

AF: We're starting to see government more generally starting to think more strategically about network diversity. We've been really busy rolling out the first six of the seven rural Local Health Districts for the NSW Government's eHealth project, which is about upgrading their 930-site WAN. We were selected as the non-fibred solution — we're providing wireless-based services as primary where no fibre exists and redundancy for critical sites that already have fibre. We want to start building our extra DMR coverage off the back of these sites and backhaul networks that we are building for these types of customers.

We're pleased now to see that people who are driving some of those conversations are starting to unpick what the incumbent carriers are saying about their path and media diverse services. And so from our perspective, we've been saying for a long time, the best diversity you can have is to have carrier diversity from carriers who use completely separate infrastructure. With us being a wireless-based carrier, we have towers and airwaves rather than pits and ducts. In the instances where we do use a backhaul partner, they've been really stringent in saying, “Show us your detailed network maps and prove to us that there's no common point of failure between your network and the network of our primary provider."

CC: With all of this networking for some very sensitive customers, how big a challenge is it to keep it all secure?

AF: In the last six months, we've been fielding a lot of calls from our enterprise customers, who are starting to move towards the cloud. They're talking about bandwidths and quality of service, and interconnect and cross-connect. We're now getting some of our bigger customers saying, “Hey listen, now that we've got this stuff set up, we're really starting to question our security policies." And I think it's going to be the next generation of big issues in broadband networks.

Customers who have critical infrastructure in water, power, public transport etc are also becoming aware of the issues around security. They are worried about the situation where a hacker might turn off a water pumping station, mess with traffic signals, change the lane indicators on the [Sydney] Harbour Bridge etc. Stuff that can be done remotely but [which would] cause a massive amount of impact for the general public. They're starting to get concerned about all the SCADA and telemetry systems, which in many cases have very little security. And because [those systems] have often been the domain of the radio group of a utility, as opposed to the IT group, they're really worried that there's not the same level of thought about the security of those networks as there would be in a corporate WAN.

Andrew Findlay will speak at Comms Connect Melbourne on 3 December on the topic of 'The rise and rise of virtualisation — threat or opportunity for land mobile radio?'. Full details on the event website.