It all began in 1994
It all started in 1994 – as TCCA celebrates its 30th year, Phil Godfrey, chair of the association from 1998 until his retirement in 2015, looks at the beginnings of TETRA, the growth of what is now TCCA, and the people who laid the foundations for its ongoing success.
“I remember in 1994, my boss in Philips Telecom asking me to attend a secret meeting in Denmark. He said that he wasn’t sure what it was all about but that it seemed to be about the new digital technologies that we had been working on. I was invited to a restaurant in Copenhagen by Ole Mork Lauridsen from Tele Danmark and met with Bruce Heyman from Motorola, Jens Moller from Tele Danmark, and others. Ole started by explaining that they run test facilities for GSM equipment and that there were serious incompatibilities between different manufacturers. He said that some handsets had to have two different sets of software built in and would run the appropriate software depending on which infrastructure a handset was logged into. He said that he wanted to ensure that the same thing didn’t happen with the emerging Mobile Digital Trunked Radio Service (MDTRS) which started development in 1989 and that later became TETRA. He wanted to know whether the main industry players would agree to cooperate in ensuring compatibility.
Later that year Ole called a meeting in the Tele Danmark offices, and he had gathered additional interested parties including Ericsson, Italtel, UK Home Office, Dutch Police, Ericsson, Jorgen Richter from the European Commission and Brian Oliver from ETSI. Ole proposed creating a Memorandum of Understanding for each of the interested parties to agree to cooperate in ensuring that the MDTRS standard, being created by ETSI, would be fully interoperable. The European Commission, I believe, had provided funding to ETSI to develop this digital technology and wanted to ensure that it became a European Standard for public safety and other mobile radio users Europe wide. It was known that the Americans were undertaking a similar process through the Association of Public Safety Officials (APCO) and the Commission wanted to have a European system. After two meetings an MoU was agreed, and the first signatures were penned in early 1995.
It was agreed that MDTRS was not a good name for a new technology as it was difficult to say, so a new name was agreed: Trans European Trunked Radio or TETRA. An Association was created under Danish Law to be responsible for marketing the technology and establishing an interoperability testing regime run by Tele Danmark. Flemming Jensen of Tele Danmark handled the administration. The now TCCA became known as the TETRA MoU Association and a logo was created which was a simplified version of the current “Hamburger” shaped TETRA Logo. With the assistance of the Philips Intellectual Property offices, I was responsible for getting the logo registered as a trademark.
Some years later, Flemming Jensen retired, and I took over as secretary to the TETRA MoU Association from the Philips offices in Cambridge. Eventually it was agreed that it would be sensible to move the Association to the UK and have it registered under UK law, although Ole Lauridsen remained the chairman until 1998.
In 1998 it was decided to hold a conference in Berlin to bring together those organisations interested in the TETRA technology. We agreed with a hotel in Berlin to have a conference for around 100 people. In fact, the interest was greater than we anticipated, and we had to move to a larger room. Even that was a bit on the small side and chairs were squashed in wherever they could find space. Attendance at this first event was 250 people from 26 countries which exceeded our wildest dreams.
The Board of the Association decided to promote the TETRA standard outside of just Europe and we created a Southern Africa TETRA Association, an Australasian TETRA Association and one in China.
TETRA World Congresses were held in various European countries as well as the Middle East, Hong Kong and Singapore. Interestingly, the event has never been held in the UK.
Eventually, it became clear that TETRA was becoming a world-wide technology, and so the mnemonic TETRA was changed to TErrestrial Trunked RAdio. We tried very hard to take TETRA to the USA and attended several APCO conferences and even took a system to the exhibition but, understandably, the Americans wanted to stick with their own technology. In more recent years, I am pleased to see an increasing cooperation with our US colleagues and even some TETRA systems appearing in the USA.
One interesting situation for the acceptance of TETRA in the UK was when I had a discussion one evening in a bar at a conference with Doug Gray of Motorola (now Motorola Solutions). Doug suggested that there was a great deal of misinformation and misunderstanding about TETRA amongst the UK Public Safety agencies and suggested a tour of the UK where Motorola and Philips would jointly explain what TETRA was all about. I must say that, as Motorola was our arch competitor, my management were very reluctant to agree to the idea, but eventually they agreed. A tour was set up with John Cox from the Mobile Radio Users’ Association, a UK based organisation. John acted as an independent consultant and chaired the sessions. Regardless of the information that we presented, the fact that the two primary suppliers and competitors in the UK public safety space were saying the same thing and working together, made a powerful impression on the UK public safety community and, the eventual result was the establishment of the Airwave system which became a hugely important tool of Public Safety communications. John Cox eventually became the secretary of the TETRA Association and then the CEO, preceding Phil Kidner.
The TETRA Association and ETSI TC-TETRA maintained a close relationship which remains to this day – it is now TC-TCCE, chaired by Brian Murgatroyd, with ETSI handling the standards development and TCCA effectively the marketing arm. Several subgroups were formed with the first being the Technical Forum, today chaired by Harald Ludwig, developing an interoperability testing regime and, also, the Security and Fraud Prevention Group (SFPG), today chaired by Trevor Evans, handling encryption and security issues.
It became clear that data was an increasingly important part of Critical Communications and ETSI developed a version of TETRA called TETRA Enhanced Data Service or TEDS. Offering a maximum throughput of 28.8 k/bits this was indeed fast compared to 14.4 k/bits over a typical copper landline. However, technology advances soon made TEDS insufficient for critical communications needs and we started to look for alternative solutions. It was suggested that something based on the emerging 3G-LTE technology might be the answer and I arranged a meeting with Balazs Bertenyi, who was chair of the Systems Architecture Group of 3GPP. I wasn’t hopeful that he would be at all interested but he agreed to meet me on the Nokia Siemens stand at the GSM World Congress in Barcelona. Balazs was very receptive and offered to put forward a proposal to incorporate Mission Critical functionality into the LTE standard at the next meeting. He invited us to present our requirements at a 3GPP SA meeting in Ljubljana which I attended with Tony Gray. Despite some reluctance from some members of his team, the proposal was accepted and the route to 3GPP standardisation of Critical Communications functionality was established. Tony was the first chair of the new Critical Communications Broadband Group, a Working Group of TCCA, now chaired by TCCA Board Vice-Chair Tero Pesonen. I consider the meeting with Balazs to be one of the most important meetings I ever had. Indeed, Balazs has been very helpful over many years and has presented at our World Congresses several times. Adrian Scrase CTO of ETSI was also very supportive.
I am delighted to see that Association continues to grow and has become such a major influencer on the world stage. It is amazing to think that all this started from a dinner meeting in Copenhagen some 30 years ago.
Two hugely influential people in the TETRA journey were Doug Gray and Phil Kidner – CEO for ten years – who served our members well, but now sadly passed away. There have been a number of people that have had a strong influence on the success of the Association and of the TETRA standard. Ray Ginman from the UK Home Office, who was chair of the Association for a two year period was also very influential in European Public Safety markets, as of course were Hans Borgonjen, Risto Toikkanen and Jeppe Jepsen.
Tony Gray and Peter Clemons have been instrumental in promoting TETRA around the world, Jolly Wong influential in the Asia region, and Kevin Graham too, who was hugely influential in Australia and the Far East, and now as the current CEO of TCCA is taking the association into the future together with chair Mladen Vratonjic and TCCA’s Board.”