Southeast Asia
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www.criticalcomms.com June 2019
Pacic. “We nd that our customers
understand the dierences of having
their technology perform over the
full lifecycle and to protect their
long-term investments including
legacytechnologies.”
is sentiment is echoed by
Sepura’s Ledger: “People want to buy
really good quality products and are
prepared to pay a little bit extra for
them, but you still need to be sharp
on price.”
Looking to the future
Given the amount of focus elsewhere
in the world on the transition to
mission-critical broadband, it would
be odd not to look at the extent
to which it is being pursued in the
region. Ledger notes that there is some
variation between countries – “if you
look at the Philippines, they’ve just
gone digital with a DMR solution for
the police, so they’re still a long way
o from moving to LTE. Singapore
upgraded their Tetrapol network
to TETRA and are now looking
at a government-sponsored LTE
broadband overlay for Singapore itself,
but not necessarily integrated.”
“e next big market move we
are noticing is toward mobile virtual
network operators (MVNOs) to
oer services on cellular networks,”
says Motorola’s Rajagopal. “is
is particularly relevant for markets
including Singapore, Malaysia, Korea
and Japan where services including
broadband push-to-talk are being
oered on cellular networks.
“We are also actively developing
advanced, next-generation
technologies to support disaster
management. For example, in
Indonesia last month we joined a
700MHz frequency trial for disaster
relief communications with e
Ministry of Communication and
Information (Kemkominfo).”
Let the data ow
To what extent are narrowband data
applications being used? “With the
exception of Singapore, they’re
probably not being used that much,
TETRA’s data capabilities are being
under-utilised,” says Ledger. “Voice
is still king for most of those users. A
lot of them even in the public safety
world don’t like to be tracked by GPS.
A lot of these countries are developing,
there’s a little bit of mistrust around
tracking people closely.”
Ledger says one of the biggest
barriers to data-based applications
is the diculties involved in sharing
information between governmental
departments and their separate (and
siloed) databases. For example, until
recently Malaysia had one department
for public transport and one for
private transport, which would cause
problems when attempting to look
up information on their independent
databases. “Apart from Singapore,
which has a very high level of ICT,
the other countries are still coming
from a lower level and in about three
or four years’ time when they start
to invest heavily in databasing and
better systems that work between
dierent departments, you’ll then
see a stronger push for the use of
broadbandtechnologies.”
Mohd Zarif Hashim, chief executive
ocer of Sapura Research (which is
part of Sapura Group) – the network
operator of Malaysia’s nationwide
TETRA network – the Government
Integrated Radio Network (see box)
– GIRN – highlights the fact that this
problem is not unique to Malaysia,
given similar issues in Europe and
the US. He says: “Malaysia has its
own data privacy act so we need to be
mindful of certain things that you can
do and certain things that you cannot
do. It’s a journey… it will get there,
we will need to do education, build
public awareness and be clear about
the standard operating procedures that
will be put in place to safeguard privacy
and the security of the data; for me it is
a change management journey that all
countries need to handle.”
Zarif adds that Sapura introduced
the use of narrowband data when it
rst launched the GIRN 10 years ago,
but the emphasis on it “is becoming
less and less signicant” due to the high
bandwidth that LTE networks oer.
Dedicated, MVNO or unied?
While we are on the subject of
broadband, Zarif says Sapura has
spent more than two years looking
at and analysing the various dierent
technologies and business models
around the use and implementation of
mission-critical broadband, and it is
now considering 5G as the technology
of choice. He explains that there are
two main reasons for this: the desire
to use the latest technology, and the
issue of spectrum. “We will have more
inuence in how 5G spectrum will
be allocated,” he says, before noting
the problems involved when trying to
inuence the use of spectrum in bands
that are already in use.
ere are three business models
currently being considered. e rst
is a dedicated 5G network for public
safety users that would run in parallel
How the GIRN came to be
The Government Integrated Radio Network (GIRN), which is operated by Sapura Research, uses some
600 TETRA base stations to serve more than 40,000 public protection and disaster relief (PPDR)
users in 16 agencies throughout Malaysia. The initial network roll-out was completed in 2008,
using equipment from Hytera Mobilfunk, and the network was later expanded using technology
fromTeltronic.
Sapura’s Mohd Zarif Hashim says the story of the GIRN began when the national regulator,
MCMC, required two-way radio users to migrate from analogue to digital systems. “At that time
there were seven government agencies requesting separate individual budgets from our central
government for their own separate radio networks – there were a lot of redundancies in terms of
capital, resource allocation.” Sapura then proposed that it build a single unied network that would
support all the users, giving each of them their own virtual private network separation. It took two
years to persuade the government and the user agencies, but this model was adopted.
The next challenge was the need to roll out the network in the shortest possible time, due to
some national security matters. Zarif adds that this was done in two years rather than the three to
four that would normally be required for a network of the GIRN’s size, and this speed of deployment
was achieved due to an iterative process of planning and implementation. In addition to operating
the GIRN, Sapura was given the task of maintaining its technology for 20 years and minimising the
risk of obsolescence, which is addressed through a programme of frequent – “almost every year”
– small refreshes, rather than one-off changes, and the network has already been updated from
circuit switching to IP.
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