Dali Wireless unveils Matrix Public Safety indoor-coverage platform that supports P25, TETRA and LTE

Dali Wireless this week announced Matrix Public Safety (Matrix PS), a modular platform that is designed to support existing land-mobile-radio technologies like P25 and TETRA, as well as LTE, which is positioned to be the next-generation broadband communications protocol for first responders throughout the world.

Unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Dali Wireless Matrix PS enables 10 GB/s data rates and represents an expansion when compared to the company’s t-series PS solution that supports 6 GB/s, according to Gary Spedaliere, senior director of technical sales for Dali Wireless. Dali Wireless already has a Matrix platform for the indoor commercial market, he said.

“The intent of Matrix was to build on all of the work we did with the t-series, make it capable of handling all of the spectrum that is licensed today or is being licensed in the near term—for example, 600 MHz in the U.S.,” Spedaliere said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “It will be a world product.”

“And, of course, it can handle all of the public-safety protocols—primarily P25 and TETRA—as well as being able to handle future public-safety protocols in LTE in Europe … and in the U.S. with FirstNet.”

In addition, the Matrix PS supports Wi-Fi coverage and will support unlicensed LTE when that technology reaches the market, Spedaliere said.

Matrix PS can support indoor-communications operation by digitizing communications that utilize as much as 320 MHz of spectrum—located in any of the commercial or public-safety bands—on a single fiber in a distributed antenna system (DAS), Spedaliere said. Although the Matrix PS platform theoretically could be used to support indoor communications for commercial and public-safety communications simultaneously, Dali Wireless typically would not recommend such a configuration, he said.

“We do not believe that, in most cases, you want to put in a system that does both public safety and commercial,” Spedaliere said. “The reason is that a commercial system is based on capacity—the highest throughput—while the [public-safety system] is based on 100% coverage to make sure that any first responder can communicate anywhere.

“Those two design principles are different, and hopefully people that are doing DAS for public safety understand that. The fundamental designs are different, the coverage requirements are different, and so they’re really two systems. The other thing that comes into play from the commercial operator’s side is liability, if they’re doing public safety. And, from the public-safety side, there is the issue of security, if they’ve got a commercial operator sharing their system.”