Several specialized mobile radio equipment manufacturers announced they agreed to adopt a common enhanced trunking protocol last week at AMTEX ’97 in Orlando, Fla.
Companies, including Kenwood Corp., Ritron, SEA and Standard Communications, announced plans to incorporate the PassPort protocol developed by Trident Micro Systems.
The PassPort protocol is designed to support wide area networking and seamless roaming for user radios between sites. Using the protocol, trunking system operators can link multiple systems together in a network to offer broader coverage and features, said Trident.
Key features of the PassPort protocol include support of up to 60,000 individual user ID codes per system and 7.5 million roamer ID codes per network, said the company. The protocol is compatible with the popular LTR standard, developed by E.F. Johnson Co.
Alan Shark, president of the American Mobile Telecommunications Association, said manufacturers haven’t always been enthusiastic about the idea of cooperating.
“I don’t think the manufacturing community has particularly felt the need to come together until recently,” Shark said. “For the longest time, they capitalized on being different-they could sell different equipment to different people.”
Forming agreements on common protocols “is something that will help us become more competitive because when you’re smaller, you have to do things a little bit differently,” continued Shark.
“By adopting a protocol to succeed the popular LTR format, these manufacturers are providing an upgrade path from the current trunking technology. More importantly for the industry, this is a protocol that allows SMR operators the ability to remain competitive and offer enhanced services similar to ESMR and personal communications services,” Shark noted.
Cooperation in the SMR manufacturing community has been a long time in the making, but the industry has shown signs of coming together since earlier this year when a group of 450 independent wireless operators formed Wireless Professional Communication Service Inc. The group met in June and developed an action plan to serve as a catalyst to bring about cooperation among manufacturers.
While Rick Stafford, managing director of WPCS, said the group will not officially endorse the protocol until further testing can be completed, it does applaud the trend of cooperation that appears to be gaining momentum.
“There is absolutely no question that if the independent SMR industry is going to continue, that it absolutely, positively has to have increased features, enriched features, and it has to have the economy of scale that can only come by all of us being on the same standard,” said Stafford.
