with the GIRN; the second is one in
which Sapura becomes an MVNO
and enables its mission-critical users
to roam between all the country’s
commercial 5G networks; while the
third option is a combined and unied
network for both commercial and
public safety users that would be built
in partnership with all of Malaysia’s
mobile network operators.
Zarif explains that in all three
options, the GIRN will remain in
place, as he expects TETRA to stay
relevant over the next 10 years, given
Sapura’s belief that 5G will not be able
in the immediate future to replace
many of TETRA’s features, such
as nearly instantaneous call set-up
time – “it will take years to prove the
technology on a 5G network”.
He says another challenge for
Sapura and Malaysia’s critical
communications community as a
whole is seizing the opportunities
created by the country’s push towards
Industry 4.0 and not lose out to IT
and ICT players. Sapura is part of the
workgroups working to dene smart
city technologies, and is providing user
agencies with command and control
capabilities (including big data and
articial intelligence), and these build
upon the TETRA dispatcher that it
initially supplied to them.
Earning its keep
Zarif says during the 10 years in which
the GIRN has been operational,
there have been many incidents that
have put its resilience and capacity
to the test, and notes that such
circumstances are when the public and
the government get most value from
the network. ese have ranged from
an incursion by armed militants into
the state of Sabah (on the island of
Borneo) in 2013, to major ooding
some ve years ago, when almost half
of the east coast of the peninsula was
ooded – “despite that, our network
was still up and running for many
weeks while public telcos were down”
– to a major landslide that aected an
area where part of the GIRN’s network
infrastructure was located, preventing
Sapura from accessing it. “We could
not physically get to the base stations,
but the network survived for more
than a week. I was thrilled to see that
the network survived in all these major
incidents and events,” Zarif says. He
attributes this success to the design of
the network – “When we designed the
GIRN we took great care to ensure
that it is robust and resilient and it
has the redundancies to survive in this
kind of situation.” In addition, Sapura
has trained its sta so they can provide
eld support to the user agencies.
One challenge that Sapura has is
that the rapid rotation of sta within
the user agencies – “sometimes as short
as six months and on average about
every two years”, says Zarif – means
it is a struggle to continually upgrade
agencies’ competency and knowledge
of mission-critical communications.
Zarif adds that Sapura initially
underestimated the scale of this issue
and addresses it through using a threetiered
approach to user accreditation
– novice, intermediate and advanced.
is allows the operator to monitor
the competencies of every user agency
using its network.
“After doing that for about 10
years, we are now ready to hand over
certain eld responsibilities to the
user agencies,” says Zarif, giving the
deployment of mobile base stations as
an example.
Another area of focus for Sapura
is reducing its environmental impact
– thanks to the falling price of solar
panels, it has been able to move
away from generator units. “We are
powering up some of the sites with
solar energy, and to me that’s not only
about cost saving but it’s also the right
thing to do; it will give us a better
carbon footprint,” Zarif adds.
Moving away from public safety,
Zarif explains that when it comes to
future metro projects, Sapura is pushing
for the cost of providing the required
GIRN/TETRA coverage to be part
of the total project cost; so rather
than being a separate cost that might
appear prohibitive, in reality it is an
insignicant fraction of the total outlay.
He adds that in Malaysia, TETRA is
the preferred means of communication
for metro operators, and Sapura
deploys two systems – one that
provides GIRN coverage to allow rstresponders
to communicate if there is
an incident in a tunnel or subway, and
the other being a parallel network for
the operators. In addition, Sapura has
been given the task of rolling out bre
and a secure public Wi-Fi network
across the whole metro system, in
addition to data analytics for enhanced
surveillance. It also provides missioncritical
communication to on- and
oshore oil and gas facilities.
With economic and population
growth, together with security
concerns driving demand for critical
communications and the high number
of natural disasters that aect the
region, Southeast Asia is clearly a key
market for our industry – a position
that will likely only become more
entrenched as organisations in the
region start to embrace mission-critical
LTE along with broadband-based
applications, and the need for disaster
response and recovery increases as the
climate crisis unfolds.
Mohd Zarif
Hashim, chief
executive ofcer of
Sapura Research
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June 2019 @CritCommsToday 13