Webinar speakers highlight differences between TETRA and DMR Tier 3 for specific use cases

Other the hand, TETRA would be ideal for an 11-site system covering a densely populated metro area with a high density of users who use significant amounts of data, Stramrood said.

“TETRA is a perfect fit for something like that, because there’s strong integration with apps and data,” he said. “The voice requirement can be met by either DMR or TETRA, so, in this case, the data side kind of leans it towards TETRA.”

The data rates vary greatly from TETRA to DMR. The highest rate a user can expect with TETRA is 28 KB/s, while users can expect about 2.4 to 3.5 KB/s with DMR, he said.

“The other side that leans strongly toward TETRA is, because you’re in an urban setting, having that in-call handover is real important,” Stramrood said. “If you’re in a wide-area coverage and you’re on a mobile and you’ve got 30 miles range from a base station, in-call handover really isn’t that important.”

Likewise, a transit organization handling large amounts of location information and real-time passenger information would be a good fit for TETRA, he said.

Norman Burrows, CEO of Fylde Microsystems, highlighted three DMR case studies performed by his company during the webinar: one with an oil refinery, one with a nuclear power plant, and one with the U.S. Army.

“The U.S. Army had a requirement for communications across various bases they have around the world, and they have a lot of legacy MPT radios … and they wanted to make good use of them,” Burrows said during the webinar. “They asked for a system that was MPT and DMR, with cross-protocol calling between the two.”

DMR was an “ideal” technology choice for this scenario, because the system can be compact and moved easily, thanks in large part to its “very, very simple” Ethernet wiring, Burrows said.

“It’s very easy to construct, dismantle and change,” he said.

Stephen Macke, creator and owner of Advent Limited, outlined two TETRA case studies involving U.S. electric utilities in Georgia. The utilities evaluated proposals for several digital technologies, including DMR. Officials for the utilities opted to use TETRA, noting slightly better voice quality, greater feature functionality and a larger ecosystem.

“One of the things that the stakeholders liked an awful lot was the amount of vendors that they could do business with after the initial infrastructure was deployed,” Macke said during the webinar. “It looks as if [both utilities] will be using multiple vendors for their subscriber units—what they call their terminals—specifically with the gateways.”

For more information about TETRA and DMR Tier 3, click here to listen to a replay of the webinar.