investment is on the in-building
coverage side, which is good for us.”
Mining and the oil and gas
industries are the largest commercial
users of critical comms, followed by
petrochemicals and utilities. Rohill and
Kapsch CarrierCom won a contract
in 2018 to expand a TETRA network
owned by Argentinian gas and oil
company YPF into Neuquén and
Mendoza provinces.
Public safety
communications
No single radio standard dominates
in Latin America, and P25, TETRA,
Tetrapol and DMR all have a presence.
“Most big public safety organisations
have P25 networks and there are
other important organisations that
have TETRA. ose countries with
a legacy of deploying P25 tend to
stay with it, whereas TETRA is more
often deployed where there have not
been previous digital two-way radio
deployments,” asserts Orsei.
Ecuador, Chile, Argentina and
Columbia have traditionally adopted
P25 due to their historical connections
with the USA, and there is a kind
of quid pro quo understanding that
countries like Columbia adopt US
technology in return for US help in
the war on drugs.
Chile has a nationwide P25 network
for use by the Carabineros, but also a
TETRA network from Airbus for the
Gendarmeria. In Brazil, the army and
military police use P25 in São Paulo,
and in September 2017 Motorola
Solutions won a contract to supply
8,000 P25 radios to ve public safety
agencies in Bogata.
Airbus supplied Mexico’s IRIS (Red
Nacional de Radiocomunicación)
Tetrapol network, which has 477 base
stations and covers 85 per cent of
the population, 75 per cent of roads
and 50 per cent of Mexico’s national
territory, while Brazil’s INTEGRAPOL
Tetrapol federal police network has a
presence in all 23 states, but with only
100 base stations it does not provide
ubiquitous coverage.
TETRA certainly appears to be
making the most headway in the
public sector. Hytera’s Fernandez Feito
observes that in Mexico, six of the 32
states have moved to TETRA and one
to P25, while in May 2018, the Federal
Highway Police in the State of Paraná
in Brazil joined an existing 12-state
TETRA network with more than 600
base stations being deployed by Hytera
subsidiary Teltronic.
In January, Hytera announced a
US$30m contract for the State of
Ceará in Brazil for use by public safety
organisations. Motorola Solutions won
a signicant contract in September
2018 to provide a TETRA network in
the State of Paraíba, complemented
by tactical mobile LTE services.
Meanwhile, DAMM secured a TETRA
contract at São Paulo-Guarulhos
International Airport in 2017.
Hytera has done well with TETRA
in Peru in recent years, where it has
secured a number of contracts for the
police and has now supplied well over
10,000 terminals. And Leonardo won
a contract in 2017 to build a new
TETRA network for the police in
Buenos Aires, Argentina.
“Mexico and Brazil are moving
towards TETRA, while some of the
smaller countries have been using
P25 since the late 1980s. However,
some of them are now moving to
TETRA, such as Peru, Venezuela
and Uruguay. e Central American
and Caribbean countries tend to
have very low budgets, so they adopt
cheaper solutions such as DMR,” says
Fernandez Feito.
Commercial comms
DMR tends to be the favoured option
in the commercial sector too, although
by no means exclusively. “ere are a
mix of radio standards in use within the
commercial sector,” says Orsei. “e
small- to medium-sized systems tend
to be DMR rather than TETRA. ere
is some use of TETRA particularly by
utilities, but DMR is gaining share.
“But DMR is not used for missioncritical
requirements or big operations.
If a mine shuts down, that could cost
millions of dollars, so mission-critical
features are a must for that kind of
commercial customer. When it comes
to networks in extreme environments
and weather areas, customers use
TETRA or P25.”
Airports have proved a good source
for TETRA contracts in the recent
past, but Cobham’s Sedas says most of
the big airports have been built and
the major project in Mexico has been
cancelled by the new President Andrés
Manuel López Obrador.
Yet there are opportunities still, as
Motorola’s Borgonovo reports. “We
have two airports operating with our
TETRA systems in Brazil: the Conns
P25, TETRA,
Tetrapol and DMR
are all in operation
in the Latin
American market
March 2019 @CritCommsToday 11