The Finnish telecoms giant said it favors a software upgrade over a remote connection to its TB3 Tetra base station as the most economical means to achieve its goal. This will negate the need to build an overlay network and preserve existing investments in billing, service provisioning, and management infrastructure.
Nokia gave no roadmap for when it plans to introduce such an upgrade, but said the evolution is unavoidable. We predict not only that high-speed data will bring more value to customers, but that high-speed data will in fact become essential, Nokia said at the annual Tetra World Congress in Vienna, Austria.
Tetra, short for Terrestrial Trunked Radio, is a digital cellular phone system used by public safety agencies such as the military and emergency services. The technology uses lower frequencies than consumer mobile networks allowing high levels of geographic coverage for a given number of transmitters. This also makes it highly tolerant of local failures. However, the system currently trades these advantages off against a much lower user density per cell.
