By using a technology specifically designed and developed based on the needs of public safety organisations, the users of RENITA take advantage of the advantages of the TETRA technology:
- TETRA is an open, fully standardized technology and thus offers a widespread ecosystem
- All offered services feature a high availability
- Extensive redundancy and resiliency mechanisms have been implemented
- All central network elements are distributed for geographically redundancy
- All elements are battery-backed
- The air-interface as well as all transmission lines are encrypted
- Additional end-to-end encryption is available for ultra-secure communications
- Terminals and their configuration are centrally managed
The TETRA (TErrestrial Trunked RAdio) technology is a professional trunked radio system:
- Terrestrial: system uses a centralized switching and management infrastructure as well as distributed terrestrial base stations
- Trunked: all resources (channels) are trunked and centrally managed
- Radio: the system uses electromagnetic waves to communicate with the end-user terminals
In order to harmonize digital radio communications, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute standardized the TETRA technology in 1990. The Standard is openly available and is continuously developed and enhanced.
Most European countries have deployed TETRA for their national public safety networks.
The cellular structure of TETRA networks is similar to the structure of todays’ public mobile 3GPP networks. However, TETRA offers additional features that are of high value to public safety officers:
- Fast call setup times (< 200ms)
- Group-based communications (one-to-many / push-to-talk (PTT))
- Direct mode communications without network connection
- Easy local extension of the network by using gateways and repeaters
- Guaranteed confidentiality by using mutual authentication and strong encryption
- Emergency-call functionality with transmission of the last known geographic position
- flexible configuration of all individual services and terminals
- remote disable of terminals