deployment “Tere’s 11 prisons nationwide in Ireland and they have
all migrated to TETRA – that’s about 1300 officers”, says Mr Kelly, beginning a rollcall of the new users. “Customs officers number almost 100. Irish Navy, Department of Foreign Affairs, and now, the Health Service Executive Ambulance Services are commencing their go-live – they will be circa 2000 users. Other users include the emergency management operations
of public utility companies, including electricity and gas and some telecoms companies. “In the event of fixed and mobile networks going down, because of the highly resilient nature of the TETRA network, it will be relied upon”, Mr Kelly explains. “Terefore they use TETRA as a failsafe, especially for their control rooms.” He adds that TETRA Ireland is also currently in discussion
with the Irish Fire Service. “We have excellent customer feedback to share with them and they’ve seen the quality of the network, and we hope that they will commence on the network early in 2012.”
Lone workers For some of these users, including a mass of ‘second- layer’ agencies that TETRA Ireland is hoping to serve – community health workers and county councils, for example – lone worker protection and personal security will be key drivers. “For mobile teams working in areas where GSM coverage is not dependable, a personal safety solution is required”, Mr Kelly says. To meet this need, TETRA Ireland has been testing a
innovative class of TETRA device, a radio pager. Tese pocket-sized two-way messaging devices are expected to become available on the network in the coming months. Mr Kelly believes that the excellent coverage of the Irish network will make pagers a useful tool and a communications
lifeline for those users who do not need voice contact. Te units will transmit and receive SDS (TETRA Short Data Service) messages, and will have an emergency button which will send the user’s GPS coordinates to the control room. Te control room will then be able to provide appropriate escalation of response.
Integration engineer Ian Mitchell is one of six engineers responsible at TETRA Ireland for monitoring the performance of the country’s National Digital Radio Service. Today he is carrying out checks on some individual network sites
About the network T
ETRA Ireland’s system is founded on Motorola infrastructure, with two Dimetra IP switches and two clusters per switch. In the event of failure at one switch, all the sites can be transferred to the other switch, on hot standby. The cross-country linking network is a resilient combination of leased
lines and microwave point-to-point radio links. System resilience is further improved by deliberate overlapping of coverage between base stations, which is also designed to improve in-building coverage. “The Dublin part of the network has been operating for almost two
years”, says Pat Kelly, chief executive. “We really haven’t had any service- impacting incident, and that really has impressed the users. Even when we had the snow last winter and we had storms, we had no loss of service. “We operate an outsourced model with some network management
and customer service performed by partners. We provide a 24-hour, 365 days a year network management and monitoring service, and similarly a customer service facility where we deal with all queries from our customers on an online portal. “TETRA Ireland, being the end-
to-end operator, provides the management of all the components of the service and manages all the customer interfaces.”
At many locations, the National Digital Radio Service shares tower space with other communications networks
Issue 3 May 2011 TE TRA TODAY
A Motorola MTS2, the standard two- carrier TETRA base station equipment used in TETRA Ireland’s network
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