Decent exposure
Last year’s PMRExpo was
As always, there was much to see and do at last year’s PMRExpo, where the two-way
radio industry came together to show off its latest wares. Sam Fenwick reports
busier than ever, with
the organisers claiming
that it was attended by
roughly 4,400 visitors and
232exhibitors.
During the conference programme,
BDBOS’s head of directorate strategy
and central management Barbara
Held shed a great deal of light on
Germany’s current thinking with
regard to critical communications.
She said that while no decisions have
been made, a future network model
has been proposed by BDBOS, which
takes a hybrid approach, which in
addition to leveraging the current
TETRA network envisages the creation
of a dedicated broadband network
operating in the 450MHz band
(the spectrum for which would be
provided by the German regulator),
and alarm buttons) and support future
applications, with this combination
having the ports to allow the reuse
of accessories that rst-responders
have purchased for use with their
current TETRA devices. She added
that BDBOS has been discussing
moving to a centralised model for
procurement, terminal governance, and
the delivery of some services (including
standardised applications), with the 16
German states, but no nal decision
has been taken yet.
During the event, Airbus and
Samsung announced their new
partnership to develop a terminal
and collaboration platform that will
support narrowband and broadband
systems. e platform is intended to
facilitate the future use of multimedia
communications by German public
safety users.
and BDBOS is “ghting to get more”
of this spectrum. is basic network
would reuse the TETRA network’s
infrastructure. It is estimated that
5,000 base stations would be required
to deliver a very basic nationwide
service; the current TETRA network
counts already as many as 4,600
sites. As the harmonised spectrum
in 700MHz has been auctioned o,
the plan also envisages RAN sharing
with commercial operators in that
band to provide additional capacity,
and obtaining additional services via
commercialoperators.
On the device side, Held said the
current vision foresees a TETRA base
module (a black box with harmonised
interfaces), together with a hardened
commercial smartphone that will act as
the control panel for the TETRA base
module (which would only retain PTT
24 www.criticalcomms.com January 2019
Claudius Pug
/www.criticalcomms.com
/www.criticalcomms.com