JOHANNESBURG, South Africa-The technology standard TETRA has come up trumps in a feasibility study conducted by Finnish company Omnitele.
The consultancy had been appointed by the South African Regulatory Authority (SATRA) in February to explore the feasibility of licensing one or more third-party operators to manage national radio trunking services for public-safety and municipal sectors. The project was 50-percent financed by the Finnish Department of Foreign Affairs.
The study is significant in that, for the first time, it expounds the possibility of introducing new trunking technologies such as TETRA, as opposed to the antiquated analog PMR systems currently being used by the three South African trunking operators.
Riitta Tiuraniemi and Markku Kivinen, consultants with Omnitele, explained that TETRA, TETRAPOL and APCO25 were all suitable technologies for South African public safety, but that TETRA was more widely accepted as a multivendor standard.
The market study revealed the estimated number of users on the network could be as high as 225,000 by 2010. For the analysis, two basic scenarios were presented: a nationwide license scenario with indoor coverage in urban/suburban areas for cellular-type terminals and outdoor coverage in rural areas for handheld terminals; and a cellular-type coverage scenario.
GSM-based systems were ruled out as unsuitable because call establishment on GSM systems is deemed too slow for public safety and the combination of cellular and public-safety PMR traffic could lead to poor performance in heavy traffic situations. Furthermore, the future GSM 450 was not included in the South African Band Replanning Exercise (SABRE), a project introduced by the Department of Communications to reallocate the frequency..
TETRAPOL and APCO25 may have an advantage in that they require fewer base stations, but in the long term TETRA appears to be the most cost-effective solution for better coverage.
The report concluded there isn’t room for two networks. A joint nationwide public-safety network would be viable with 157,000 subscribers and 1,000 sites. The cellular-type scenario would be cheaper, but would not help the areas needing the services most.
Omnitele recommended that the process be initiated as soon as possible and the state should decide whether it would fund the venture, as is the case in Finland, or if the venture should be privately funded.
The cost to the operator for a TETRA network could well be over R180 million (US$29.7 million), and it could take more than 10 years to recoup the investment. The selection of an appropriate standard should be left with the operator, which should be allowed to build its own transmission backbone, according to the consultancy.
