Sepura visit
While Ledger says some customers are asking for
broadband, but struggle to say why they need it beyond ‘it’s
got to be better than narrowband’, he believes that at the end
of the day, customers will only invest if they see that it results
in operational efficiencies.
Ledger gives an example from the TETRA world. “Our
partner in Australia, Radlink, has developed so many
applications for the mining industry that generate
operational efficiencies that the companies are willing to
invest in infrastructure that has multiple control channels.
Monitoring the speed of a vehicle in a remote location: is that
person speeding, is the vehicle upside down, is it in the wrong
position? It’s a safety thing: it’s automatically changing a
talkgroup when one truck moves from the haulage road to the
unloading area without the driver having to take his hands
off the wheel. In addition, every morning there are five
questions sent to every person on a mine: Take Five, they call
it, and that’s sent across TETRA today.”
Croft highlights the value that comes from users having
to use their radios – “their lifeline” – to perform such tasks,
namely that the company doesn’t have to worry about its
workers leaving them behind, as might be the case with
another device; “building these applications into the device
which is their lifeline makes it happen. If you have it as a
secondary thing, it’s easily forgotten.”
Ledger adds that those companies that really understand
their customers are the ones that have been successfully selling
TETRA applications – noting that Radlink employs people
who have worked in the mines it sells to and understand
their challenges and risks, along with areas where operational
efficiencies can be made.
Similarly, Croft adds that much of the insight Sepura
uses to inform its product development programme “is the
minutia of people’s activities – they’re the really critical things;
if we can pick up on those, record them and then build our
products and applications to fit what they do, not the other
way round, that makes the difference. Apps have to be part of
the product, not something else to do, they have to be part
of a daily routine; as soon as you go off the day-in-the-life
route, you get into the ‘oh, I forgot about…’ or ‘it didn’t
happen’ or ‘I left it in a drawer’.”
Apps have to be part of the product,
not something else to do, they
have to be part of a daily routine
“If you look at one of our recent sales successes, which
has generated a lot of publicity,” adds Ledger, “part of that
came from presenting to that customer in the tender/RFI
phase in this room about ‘a day in a life’, and there were two
things that came up while discussing the customer’s endusers
that have been adopted as new services for them.”
One factor that grew in importance in the UK public
safety sector when the programme to deliver the Emergency
Service Network (ESN) switched to the incremental delivery
of functionality is the capacity of user organisations to handle
change – both logistically and in terms of the changes to
operating procedures that are needed to take advantage of
new features. Does Sepura ever encounter a similar issue?
“It varies,” Ledger says. “Some UK police forces are better
at change and adapting than others. Some of our customers
have surprised me by just how willing they are to look at
things with new eyes – they’re embracing the data-centric
approach and how they can use it to make themselves more
efficient and save money; but then there’s others who say
‘we’ve always operated like this’ – and they can be resistant
to change. We need to use the early adopters and evangelise
their usage of new technology. At Sepura, we do that
through holding an annual UK user group forum, where we
bring all our customers, share best practice, share what works
in other forces – we don’t chair it – it’s chaired by end-users;
we just get together and they talk about the issues and how
they are using our devices together. That happens in other
markets as well; our partners in the Netherlands and Belgium,
as well as Scandinavia, bring in Sepura users and talk about
what’s new, best practice, all those sorts of things – that’s a
good way of helping organisations to drive change.”
We then pass through the area where Sepura’s LTE
mobile terminal is being developed – a mix of normal
office workstations and benches with test and measurement
equipment, such as signal analysers. I’m told that this is
where all product development takes place and all of Sepura’s
TETRA terminals were developed here. Here too is where
the vast majority of the company’s terminals are supported,
with one of the biggest challenges being the amount of
customisation that has to be supported.
We then head to the company’s test lab. On the way,
Croft explains that when it comes to voice quality, the most
important criterion is call intelligibility – the ability for
someone to hear each and every word during a call, rather
than how closely the call’s audio resembles normal speech.
We are ushered into an anechoic chamber. The door is
sealed and suddenly all background noise vanishes. It is quiet
– so quiet that in fact some people can become a bit “giddy”. I
suffer no strange effects, but my voice feels strangely distorted,
as if my ears aren’t used to hearing it in the absence of all
other sound. In the middle of the chamber is something
resembling a crash test dummy wearing a police anti-stab
vest jacket. It is here that sound-pressure testing is performed
to ensure that use of the company’s devices cannot result in
hearing damage, even when held right next to the ear.
A great deal
of mechanical
testing is done to
ensure that the
two-way radios
can withstand
heavy use
September 2019 @CritCommsToday 27