Tetra 10111 centres due countrywide

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 30 Oct 2007

The police will have nationwide Terrestrial Trunked Radio (Tetra) coverage, based on a European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) open specification, by 2015.

Tetra network engineer senior superintendent Richard Irish says the police will then be able to track every officer carrying a radio handset and radio-fitted vehicle in real-time. This will allow them to speedily dispatch the nearest law enforcer to a reported incident.

President Thabo Mbeki yesterday opened the first Tetra-based police 10111 centre in Midrand, calling it a major investment in the fight against crime.

The R600 million centre is staffed by 112 police officers and civilians per 12-hour shift. They employ geospatial programming combined with Tetra tracking and a variety of databases to determine the scene of an incident, caller identity and the location of the nearest police officer.

Mbeki said every province will in due course have such a centre to replace current, outdated, infrastructure. He said the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal are next in line, followed by the rest of the provinces.

112 emergency centre

Project manager assistant commissioner Danny Pillay says the centres will, in due course, be integrated with the Department of Communications' planned "112" all-emergencies call centres.

Pillay says, once operational, anyone will be able to phone "112" toll-free from any fixed or mobile handset to report any type of emergency. Those requiring police assistance will then be transferred to the relevant provincial 10111 centre.

He says teething troubles - including negative environmental impact studies - delayed the Gauteng implementation, which, in the end, took four years.

In addition to the contact centre in Midrand and the Motorola hand- and vehicle-mounted Tetra radios, the Gauteng system also includes 67 hilltop masts fitted with radio frequency repeaters.

"As it stands, this is the biggest, most expensive tender the police have ever awarded."

National roll-out

He is hopeful that future implementations will go faster and is budgeting two years for each. "The implementations are piecemeal and are a long-term thing."

Irish says all the provincial systems will be integrated and interoperable - hence the use of the ETSI specification. "We did a lot of research on that."

It is not a given that the tender for the Eastern Cape Tetra network and 10111 contact centre will be awarded to Altech or use Motorola technology, Irish says. The tender is currently open and closes 18 December.

"We are not vendor-dependent or technology-dependent. This system uses an open worldwide standard."

Irish adds that seven companies have so far expressed an interest in the Eastern Cape project.