Public safety and mission-critical business comms require excellent radio coverage, even in the toughest of environ-ments. Ian Brown, ceo of Axell Wireless, tells Keith Dyer about the role Axell is playing in meeting the needs of its customers
Keith Dyer:
Ian, can you tell us about Axell’s role in the wireless coverage market?
Ian Brown:
Axell Wireless has a position as one of the largest manufacturers of wireless coverage solutions globally – certainly in the top three. And today it is the worldwide market leader in public safety systems – with solutions that cover the range of standards such as Tetra, Tetrapol, P25 and GSM/R.
Keith Dyer:
What does “wireless coverage solutions” mean in this instance?
Ian Brown:
We provide products and solutions that enable mobile devices like mobile phones and PMR handsets to work in confined spaces. That means environments like tunnels, metro transport networks, shopping centres and the like. Large buildings reflect RF, especially modern buildings, so we also provide the solutions to offer in-building coverage.
We also have solutions that go on some form of transport, for instance inter-city trains, and we are part of a consortium to provide coverage on-board aeroplanes.
As well as the public safety standards I mentioned, we can cover any mobile radio technology from FM radio up to GSM, UMTS, WiMax and LTE. In the industry today we are seeing requirements for the provision of both cellular and public safety coverage at the same time. For instance at Heathrow Terminal 5 we provided single system coverage for the police, ambulance and fire services, as well as for BAA and BA internal comms, and cellular coverage for all the mobile operators.
Keith Dyer:
So what products and solutions provide these coverage solutions?
Ian Brown:
Axell Wireless supplies repeaters and passive products to meet our customers’ coverage requirements. Our solutions encompass systems that use both standard and customised products. The latter can be particularly useful for harsh environments where ventilation, power supply and physical size constraints are often an issue.
In recent years, the provision of coverage for wireless devices has become expected, no matter where you are, and is even in some instances mandatory. This coverage is required to meet the needs of both the general public, who expect their mobile phones and other PDA’s to work at all times, and the emergency services who need reliable communications for efficient incident management and personal safety.
Whether the requirement is to extend coverage from outside into an underground metro station/ tunnel or to distribute additional capacity from extra base stations to serve new subscribers, we have the proven expertise and experience to design and implement the optimum solution.
The construction of metro infrastructures, for instance, varies widely, so Axell Wireless employs a flexible approach to the provision of communication enhancement systems, which are uniquely configured to provide the required quality of coverage for the specific location.
Where coverage is required inside buildings such as an airport, a network of distributed antennas can provide the most practical solution. The RF source could be an off-air Repeater, a dedicated base-station or a mixture of these, depending upon the capacity requirements.
Our solutions range from an A4-sized box that may go inside a police station, say, to ensure the continuity of a national security network, to a rack of equipment that might provide coverage through a major rail tunnel. The equipment can be standard as well as customised to withstand harsh environments such as you might find in an underground tunnel, with water leaks or dust, for instance. Also, we often have to work where there is no mains power supply, and only a low voltage supply feed, e.g. 48v.
That means we have to provide flexible, multi-band coverage in a variety of locations and to support different applications and use cases. For example, for large coverage areas such as metros, fibre optic distribution systems are most commonly used, where a number of fibre fed repeaters are linked to an optical master unit (OMU) using mono mode fibre. Over 20 repeaters can be connected to the same OMU and be installed up to 20 km from the base station. The repeaters relay the signal into the coverage area via radiating cable or antennas. The fibre repeaters can be single, dual or multiple band operation. The OMU can either interface directly with a local BTS (often called a BTS hotel) or can be fed via a number of off air repeaters.
Keith Dyer:
You recently acquired Dekolink, which provided you with the means to use digital technology, making your solutions more flexible in deployment.
Ian Brown:
Yes, whilst Axell had its own digital program, Dekolink have been pioneers in this field for several years and following the acquisition we were able to integrate Dekolink’s digital repeater technology with Axell’s existing multiband solutions to bring to market an extended range of solutions. Our digital repeater filter technology (sometimes referred to as SDR – Software Defined Radio) is the most advanced and flexible in the industry, allowing total configuration flexibility for filtering radio channels. The technologies developed by Dekolink, as well as its product range and research and development (R&D) capabilities are highly complementary to those of Axell Wireless. We’re very excited by these unique filtering capabilities – which provide what our customers have been asking for. We can condense these systems into a neat, small form factor that can operate in areas where space is limited
This capability has allowed us to launch at the Tetra World Congress the world’s first digital Tetra SDR repeater platform.
In addition to the sophisticated filtering capability the new platform supports frequency shifting, which allows us to shift the frequency of the signal to a channel or frequency that doesn’t interfere with the main system, and then transmit that signal at high power through our digital repeater to propagate another area, where the signal is then converted back to the original frequency. It’s ideal for solutions where coverage is more important than high capacity, which is often the case with many public safety systems.
Keith Dyer:
Although you mention the need to provide multi-band coverage to support wireless operators as well as public safety networks, how important is the TETRA community to your business?
Ian Brown:
TETRA is huge for us, it’s become a very popular and mature PMR standard, not just for emergency service first responders, but in industrial and enterprise markets such as the nuclear power industry, oil and gas fields, football stadiums and large shopping malls. TETRA has become a standard way to provide the kind of wireless system you need if you are responsible for security on a large nuclear plant, for instance. And it still has plenty of potential, both in Europe but also in other markets across China, Asia and Latin America. Even in the USA there is increasing penetration of the TETRA standard. People were predicting that TETRA would be one of those technologies that exploded initially, and then faded away, perhaps as other wireless standards became ubiquitous. But it’s not been like that at all. The reach of TETRA is continuously expanding.
Within the public safety arena there is acceptance that the network must be completely resilient. Nobody wants their lack of investment or planning to be responsible for a loss of communications in a major incident – when cellular networks are often switched off. There’s also scope for expansion via the technical progress of TETRA, with Tetra High Speed Data providing high data rate applications, so police officers can more easily access live images of a scene whilst mobile, for instance.
Keith Dyer:
Do you work directly to the market or can customers access your solutions through other channels
Ian Brown:
It’s both, of course. We work through systems integrators and other channel partners. However we believe it is very important to directly correspond with the local safety and comms authorities and network operators in each country. We deliver solutions to them in conjunction with local partners operating as part of the design team. We are often involved on site to help with the installation and commissioning of our systems. We are helped in this by our international presence, with 10 offices worldwide and 300 staff. We are headquartered in the UK but 80% of our £45 million annual revenue comes from international sales, which is testament to our ability to be able to do business in a range of differing cultures. Our achievements in international trade were recently recognised by the granting of a “Queens Award for Enterprise”.