TETRA

TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) is a digital trunked mobile radio standard developed to meet the needs of traditional Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) user organisations such as:

• Public Safety 
• Transportation 
• Utilities 
• Government 
• Military 
• PAMR 
• Commercial & Industry 
• Oil & Gas

The TETRA standard has been specifically developed to meet the needs of a variety of traditional PMR user organisations. This means it has a scaleable architecture allowing economic network deployments ranging from single site local area coverage to multiple site wide area national coverage.

Some unique PMR services of TETRA are:

• Wide area fast call set-up "all informed net" group calls 
• Direct Mode Operation (DMO) allowing "back to back" communications between radio terminals independent of the network 
• High level voice encryption to meet the security needs of public safety organisations 
• An Emergency Call facility that gets through even if the system is busy 
• Full duplex voice for PABX and PSTN telephony communications

Besides meeting the needs of traditional PMR user organisations, the TETRA standard has also been developed to meet the needs of Public Access Mobile Radio (PAMR) operators.

To meet the ever changing user requirements and utilise the latest in technology developments, TETRA continues to be evolved and enhanced with the development of new standards. An example of this is TETRA Release 2, which includes the TETRA Enhanced Data Service (TEDS) that provides wideband high speed data communication services.

Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) is one of a number of digital wireless communication technologies standardized by ETSI.

ETSI technical committee TETRA produces standards for a frequency spectrum efficient digital PMR and PAMR system to support voice and data services using techniques such as Trunking, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) methods and a variety of efficient modulation schemes for increased data throughput.

Active TETRA WGs:

• WG1 TETRA User Requirements / Services
• WG3 TETRA Network aspects
• WG4 TETRA High Speed Data
• WG5 TETRA Voice coding
• WG6 TETRA Security
• WG8 TETRA Direct Mode Operation.

Within ETSI, the work of the TETRA committee depends on effective cooperation with other committees, such as ETSI EMC & Radio Spectrum Matters (ERM) committee, ETSI EMTEL, the MESA Project and ETSI SAGE for security matters.

Outside ETSI, the TETRA committee liaises with the TETRA Association on promotional and technical discussions on how to best advance the TETRA Standard.

TETRA codes and security algorithms

Details of TETRA Security algorithms (TEA1, TEA3, TEA4, TAA1).

Details of the following TETRA codes:

• SDS-TL protocol identifier
• Proprietary element owner information element value code
• Location system coding scheme code
• Type Approval Code
• Final Assembly Code.

The following is a list of useful TETRA related standards and other ETSI documents. Please use the ETSI Work Programme to find further related standards.