Middle East
12
Heat and the Hajj
One of the most high-profile uses of TETRA in the Middle East is its role in ensuring the smooth
running of the Hajj, the pilgrimage that takes place every year (the dates involved vary due to the
use of the lunar calendar) in KSA over a period of six days, and the safety of the roughly 1.8 million
pilgrims who undertake it each year. The TETRA network for the Hajj is operated by STC Specialized,
and Airbus has been providing TETRA equipment for this purpose since 2017.
During this year’s Hajj, various security organisations used Airbus’s solutions, which include
the slimline Th1n TETRA radio and Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) technology. These inform
dispatchers of each mobile unit’s location, status and active TETRA talk groups. The information was
then sent to all the relevant emergency personnel using the STC Specialized network (which uses
TETRA equipment from Airbus), such as the Ministry of Hajj, the Ministry of Health, and the Mecca
Municipality. The company’s solutions aided the monitoring of the Hajj, along with communication
between ground staff and the control rooms.
It is worth noting that the work to ensure the health and safety of the Hajj’s pilgrims is expected
to become more difficult, given the effects of climate change. During the Hajj, they spend roughly
20-30 hours outside in the open air, and a paper in the journal Geophysical Review Letters, by MIT
professor of civil and environmental engineering Elfatih Eltahir and two others, states that risks to
Hajj participants could have been serious this year and could be again next year, as well as when
the Hajj takes place in the hottest summer months – from 2047 to 2052 and from 2079 to 2086.
While a number of protective measures have been in place in recent years such as nozzles to spray
mists of cooling water in some outdoor locations and the widening of some locations, Eltahir says
that it in the riskiest years ahead it may be necessary to severely limit the number of pilgrims.
www.criticalcomms.com September 2019
networks, while taking non-missioncritical
broadband services from mobile
operators. Clearly, Nedaa in Dubai
has been leading the way, building
a comprehensive 5G-ready network
that is expected to be up and running
ahead of next year’s Expo 2020. Qatar,
Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and others are
looking at MCPTT/MCX solutions.
KSA is steadily cleaning up valuable
spectrum resources which should
allow the deployment of advanced
public safety LTE solutions quite soon
as Saudi Vision 2030 modernisation
efforts accelerate. The number of
broadband trials has increased recently,
so as agencies trial these new services
with suppliers and network operators,
decisions will be made regarding the
precise model for next-generation
services, with a wide range of hybrid
solutions likely over the next five years.”
Whyte adds that mission-critical
broadband “hovers over all decisions
that are made regarding large critical
communications system investments
in the region – should organisations
continue to invest in TETRA, take a
plunge into the unknown with LTE for
critical communications or wait until
they’re sure that it’s fit for that purpose?
It’s rapidly developing and hitting more
and more milestones in its effort to
fully meet the requirements of critical
communication users. However, it’s not
there yet.”
While Clemons says many TETRA
networks in the region were upgraded
around 2016/17 so are still relatively
new, Sepura’s Whyte says “there’s
considerable investment in building new
or refreshing and upgrading existing
systems, we’re working on projects in
Iraq, Oman, Jordan, UAE that are
currently – or have expressed interest
in – upgrading their infrastructure, so
people are still heavily investing further
in TETRA”.
Regional scale
Airbus’s Forbes gives us a sense of the
scale of the TETRA install base in the
Middle East: Airbus “has implemented
nationwide TETRA hybrid networks
for the UAE’s police and army, while
the Ministry of Interior and the defence
ministries within Saudi Arabia all use
Airbus technology and capabilities.
“We have equipped the majority
of governments in the Middle East and
North Africa and supplied narrow-
and broadband technology to Kuwait,
Lebanon, Bahrain, Iraq and KSA. Airbus
has also supplied some business-critical
capabilities for places like Abu Dhabi,
for the onshore petroleum operations in
Saudi Arabia with Saudi Aramco. Airbus
is also working with key operators such
as Nedaa and STC Specialized (formerly
Bravo). They have capabilities in a lot of
the airports in the region, and in Dubai’s
metro. In addition, a number of hotels
and shopping malls in Dubai use Airbus
communications technology to provide
security and co-ordination for their staff.
“The Abu Dhabi Formula 1
Grand Prix also uses Airbus SLC
communications technology and
currently we’re working on a number
of large projects across the region with
different entities and different sectors at
the moment.”
Similarly Sepura’s Whyte says that his
company “has a substantial deployment
of products across the region, so a
considerable amount of time is invested
in supporting, upgrading and refreshing
those fleets of radios that our customers
use. We spend a lot of time and effort
working to keep our customers satisfied,
and though we might not always win
every project, we tend
not to lose any existing customers to the
competition.”
Whyte adds that some of his
company’s data-based applications (for
database and image queries and indoor
location) are in use in the Middle East,
but the take-up has not been as large
as in Europe, where there is greater
emphasis on increasing end-users’
efficiency. However, he adds that
oil and gas companies in the region
are using indoor location combined with
geofencing to ensure that if a worker
tries to enter an ATEX zone while
using a non-ATEX two-way radio, the
installation’s command
centre is immediately alerted,
thereby boosting worker safety and
compliance with company health and
safety policies.
He adds that he has seen some
body-worn video deployments, but not
many. Some deployments have taken
place within those organisations that
are implementing LTE – “it makes
decision-making for critical situations
more precise if you can stream quality,
content-rich data back to a control
centre”, he says.
Our time together is nearly at an end,
but before we go, Quixoticity’s Clemons
has some final words: “After a couple of
years of relative stagnation of the Middle
East public safety communications
market, change is definitely back in
the air. Standards are ready, plans
have matured, early deployments are
showing the way to the rest and I’m very
optimistic that the next 12 months will
see significant progress.”
/www.criticalcomms.com