The View on the Other Side of the Pond
“Integration” dominated presentations at the British Association of Public-Safety Communications Officers’ (BAPCO) second annual conference in London, May 10-11.
Integration refers to control room consolidation of dispatching for multiple agencies. (What we refer to as a call center, dispatch center or public safety answering point, the British call a control room.) Horizontal integration consolidates dispatching for multiple agencies of the same type in one control room and usually covers a region. Vertical integration combines dispatching for two or more types of agencies (usually police service, fire brigade or ambulance trust), generally for a local area.
In contrast, issues that rivet public safety officials in the United States usually involve technology and frequency assignments.
For example, despite reaching milestones in setting standards and implementing frequency-division, multiple access (FDMA) technology for digital systems, many manufacturers insist that some of their users want time-division, multiple-access (TDMA) technology. Ericsson has championed TDMA as the industry’s brightest lights have devoted enormous resources to develop a U.S. digital standard under a process named Project 25 by the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials-International (APCO).
A few months ago, APCO agreed to consider adding two TDMA technologies to Phase II of Project 25: Ericsson’s proposed two-slot TDMA technology and the existing four-slot TDMA technology embodied in the Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) protocol widely used first in Europe.
Motorola has said that most of its digital public safety radio users in other parts of the world want TETRA, whereas most of its U.S. users say that they want FDMA. That, Motorola has said, led the company to support FDMA during the Project 25 process that developed a standard along the lines of the company’s Astro digital technology. In meeting after meeting, TDMA proposals were considered and turned aside.
Companies selling TETRA equipment have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that requires them to license TETRA intellectual property rights (IPR) to one another under fair and reasonable terms.
In the United States, Motorola is doing well with FDMA Astro and doesn’t have to compete with other suppliers on the scale it does elsewhere with TETRA. Motorola has said it doesn’t have to license its TETRA IPR for use in the United States because TETRA is a European standard.
“The MOU says nothing about geographical restrictions,” TETRA proponents at BAPCO told me.
Motorola representatives I’ve spoken to say that the company is perfectly willing to license TETRA IPR if and when TETRA is adopted as a U.S. standard. Rather than trying to force a license from Motorola through litigation based on language in the MOU, TETRA proponents are looking to meet Motorola’s limitation by ushering TETRA through U.S. standards processes.
Back in the States, Art McDole, co-chairman of the Project 25 Steering Committee, pointed out that about 80% of U.S. public safety systems have fewer than 50 mobile units. He said that FDMA was the best for serving these small, independent users.
Meanwhile, he explained that TDMA is ideally suited for large systems. “There is a definite place for TDMA in U.S. public safety, but not as a single methodology. It has drawbacks, such as difficulty in working outside of the infrastructure on a unit-to-unit basis, which our users say they must have. The subscriber units are low-power to suit European standards and, consequently, cost less. Battery consumption on portable units is much higher because TDMA requires linear amplifiers. The cost of the infrastructure, due both to the requirement for more stations and the design, appears to be considerably higher. These considerations led to the adoption of FDMA for Phase I. Phase II is considering two proposals for TDMA as well as an FDMA approach. It is all about what the users want,” McDole said.
Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, with the technology battle long since settled and the issue of multiple equipment suppliers already fully sorted out, some of the attendees fairly chirped their happiness over the uniform communications capabilities offered by TETRA. One of them explained that previously, agency operations had to be defined according to their radio communications availability and segregation resulting from frequency assignments and channel capacities. Now agencies are redefining their operations according to the public need and shaping their use of TETRA talk groups to fit. It’s not an easy process because it can disrupt long-standing traditional procedures. That notion of integration is the one that’s really proving to be thorny. It raises questions about compensation, cross-training, work load, relocation, competence and other factors.
Maybe so many interests are involved in public safety communications that no plan can enjoy support from everyone involved. In the United States, the technology question undergoes continuous review. In the United Kingdom, the operational question involving control rooms provides more than enough reason for investigation of possibilities and conflicting proposals.
It’s impossible to say whether the U.S. technology question will ever reach a period during which is it considered mostly resolved. Maybe if both FDMA and TDMA technologies are equally available for digital public safety systems, operational questions will lead the agenda. The contrast between the two nations’ public safety communications approaches provides ideas for each to use as alternatives.
