NJ Transit
NJ Transit covers a service area of 5,325 square miles and operates a fleet of 2,027 buses, 711 trains and 45 light rail vehicles. On 236 bus routes and 11 rail lines statewide, NJ Transit provides nearly 223 million passenger trips each year.
In an interview in advance of the upcoming TETRA Congress Americas 2014 Andy Schwartz, NJ Transit’s director of radio communications, said they chose a TETRA system because of, “business requirements for a data-centric system where standards adherence was important. We did not specify a technology. When the entire process was completed, the award went to a vendor with a TETRA-based system. We believe this was the best choice for NJ Transit given the maturity of TETRA and its rich feature set.”
According to Schwartz, the biggest challenges have been in the regulatory environment.
“TETRA is new to this country, and there was no regulatory framework already in place to get this licensed," said Jim DiMauro, now managing director with RCC Consultants but formerly technical project manager for Alcatel-Lucent. DiMauro said the TETRA installation “was challenging on a lot of fronts. This was the first implementation of this type of technology for public safety users in the U.S. We had to get a new emissions mask approved by the FCC [Federal Communications Commission], and there were questions raised about how readily this could be done. We were treading new territory.”
The FCC had not previously allowed TETRA systems in the U.S. due to interoperability issues with public safety P25 radio systems. TETRA radios cannot be used on a P25 infrastructure and vice versa.
NJ Transit is a public transportation authority, not a first responder, and thus, doesn’t need interoperability with 800 MHz public safety systems, according to its Request for Waiver filing with the FCC. Also, gateway devices are available to enable P25 and TETRA systems to work together when needed.
In September 2012 the FCC approved NJ Transit’s TETRA deployment.