Motorola shipping MOTOTRBO Capacity Plus
Motorola this week announced shipment of its MOTOTRBO Capacity Plus, a single-site digital trunking solution for VHF and UHF that uses TDMA technology to meet 6.25 KHz channel equivalency guidelines.
Announced during IWCE, Capacity Plus delivers more than twice the capacity of a MOTOTBO digital conventional system, three times the capacity of an analog trunking system and five times the capacity of an analog conventional system, according to Motorola. For existing MOTOTRBO customers, Capacity Plus is available as a software upgrade, said Paul Cizek, Motorola’s director of North America professional/commercial radios.
“The excitement is very high, especially when people can migrate very easily from a conventional product they may start with to … trunking without having to add extra equipment,” Cezik said.
Paul Hyde, president and CEO of Leading Edge Wireless, a service provider and dealer based in Memphis, Tenn., said Capacity Plus “worked flawlessly” in beta tests that Leading Edge has conducted in cooperation with Motorola. Leading Edge is in the process of moving its service customers from a 700 MHz system to a UHF MOTOTRBO system with Capacity Plus.
In addition to increasing the number of available voice paths, Capacity Plus generates additional data capacity, which is especially attractive to users that want to use texting and GPS-based applications such as AVL solutions. With this in mind, Hyde believes Capacity Plus will be popular among his dealer customers.
“We expect it to be our workhorse,” Hyde said. “The price is incredible.”
For the most part, MOTOTRBO and Capacity Plus are being targeted for enterprises such as resorts, hotels, hospitals and warehouses. Motorola believes P25 systems are more appropriate for mission-critical communications because of the security, interoperability, other feature sets that responder want, but Cezik said MOTOTRBO and Capacity Plus could be attractive to some smaller public-safety agencies.
“There are rural public-safety customers who, because of budget concerns, may not be able to afford a P25 solution,” he said. “If that’s really the right budget fit for the customer, we can certainly make that work.”
