Where will TETRA be in five years’ time?

Still growing, I think. TETRA targeted customers are conservative by nature – the stakes are so high in communications, that to move from one technology to another is a big undertaking and very carefully planned. So, the pioneers in TETRA have been vindicated, that’s why, in the UK, a single network with 300?000 users can survive the riots. 

We saw Airwave talk about the huge increase in traffic and users on the network in one day. The rest of the world looks at these networks and are beginning to deploy them. It takes time to go and do that. We think that growth is going to keep going – for mission critical voice, TETRA is going to be the solution deployed. The reason for that is there are a number key features that are being added into TETRA all the time – basic things you need to have in a PMR solution such as Direct Mode operation – we have that in TETRA but you don’t have that in LTE today. 

As a vendor, I have a lot of things that people are asking me to go and do. 

Here we are, a long way into the TETRA deployment cycle and I’m still getting lots of requests for adding features. Any new customer coming into TETRA now gets the benefit of 15 years of features, from a community that’s very like-minded.

At TWC, you’ve seen so many product announcements – we’ve announced a whole new portfolio of radios for the MTP3000 series – which is testament to our customers who are saying ‘are you investing in it?’. Yes we are, and we will continue to invest because we think it’s a very strong and vibrant technology and community.