Re: What's wrong with TETRA?
What's wrong with TETRA?
I was about to post the same question. I do not work in the emergency services but from everything I have read, TETRA was designed from the ground up to be the "ideal" (or close to what ideal meant 25 years ago) radio service. It has certain features such as group calling, one-to-many, push-to-talk with no setup (i.e. no "dialling") that even 3G struggles with, and 4G LTE can't do voice reliably at all as far as I'm aware. These features are absolutely vital for emergency services.
There's also the issue of coverage and again, I believe that the current TETRA network has better geographical coverage of the uk than any other technology, and of course TETRA stations can work in "mesh" network mode to enable coverage to be extended to places such as the underground with nothing more than a small battery-powered unit, or an officer stood between the rescue team and a good signal. Try getting 4G on the underground if a bomb has taken out the comms and power to half a mile of tunnel under Canary Wharf!
The main problems with TETRA are said to be relatively poor battery life (it has a linear amplifier for some technical reason) and the lack of high speed data. Well, so what if the units look more like mobile phones from 1996 than smartphones from 2016? I'd rather rely on something big and chunky that won't be useless because some perp clobbered it with a baseball bat and cracked the screen, than a smartphone-alike, especially if it has a fragile touchscreen that can't be used in the rain.
Surely a TETRA-compatible device could be designed that uses more modern radio technology and has better battery life (and probably costs less), while containing a secondary 3G/4G radio for high speed data when coverage is available? If a large touchscreen is necessary for the facilities high speed data will make available, perhaps design a folding or sliding unit with "normal" keys on the outside, with the advantage that the fragile touchscreen is protected when not in use.
TETRA itself had a lot of teething problems when it launched (not least interference with broadcast TV) and we have come to expect that government procurement contracts are basically the product of a monkey squeezing a squid onto a bit of paper and selling it to the highest bidder, but can't we dream of something better, and of people to run it who actually know what they are talking about? I believe that TETRA is held in much higher regard now than were the FM systems it replaced, so shouldn't we be building on its successes rather than scrapping it and starting again?
M.