TETRA standards to be enhanced

Nov 1, 2000 12:00 PM, MOBILE RADIO TECHNOLOGY STAFF

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute has approved enhancements to the TETRA standard in the 3G market place. The second-coming of TETRA will offer new features such as new multimedia services, high-speed data rates, 3G compatibility and roaming.

According to Karl Heinz Rosenbrock, ETSI director-general, "The enhancement of the TETRA standard demonstrates the ongoing commitment of ETSI to this technology. This decision will ensure that the investments made by manufacturers, network operators and users will be protected for many years to come, and that the TETRA standard will have its place alongside future 3G technologies."

TETRA Release 2 will incorporate additional features in accordance with the following, among others:

o Evolution of TETRA to provide higher speed packet data in support of multimedia and other high-speed data applications required by existing and future TETRA users.

o Selection and standardization (as appropriate) of an additional speech codec (or set of codecs) for TETRA, to enable intercommunication between TETRA and other 3G networks without transcoding, and to provide enhanced voice quality for TETRA by using the latest low-bit-rate voice codec technology.

o Further enhancements of the TETRA air interface standard to provide increased benefits and optimization in terms of spectrum efficiency, network subscriber capacity, system performance, quality of service, size and cost of terminals and battery life.

o Production and/or adoption of standards to provide improved interworking and roaming between TETRA and public mobile networks such as GSM, GPRS and UMTS and other 3G/IP networks.

o Ensure full backward compatibility and integration of the new services with the exisiting suite of standards, in order to safeguard existing and future inventments by TETRA users.