Motorola Tetra radio system comming to the US ??
- Thread starter rbluesky
- Start date
BinaryMode
Blondie Once Said To Call Her But Never Answerd
If it's connected to the Internet you better have a contingency to protect all 7 layers of the OSI model.
ARP spoofing, MAC cloning, layer 3, 4 and 7 DDoS, etc.
Why everyone wants to connect everything to the Internet I don't know. It's rife for disaster. Mark my words. I'll archive this thread for a future "told you so." Besides, I can't tell you how many times I hear fire or EMS, and back when I could hear them, PD say their computer (MDT) was down. Now switch all audio Comms to that and then what?
Moral of the story: just because you can doesn't mean you should.
In my opinion at least...
mmckenna
I ♥ Ø
OK.
But, remember that interfering with a radio system is pretty easy, also.
And, keep in mind that RadioReference is not a magical research and development think tank for the two way radio industry. These sorts of challenges get thought out well in advance, before hobbyists are even aware of it.
The systems used to support MDT's in the old days were quite a bit different. Usually not IP based at all.
Also, when they were saying the "MDT's were down", often it was the database server that was down, not the network.
Big difference between a point to point 9600 baud serial link and a modern IP network with redundancies and alternate paths. It's kind of like comparing a horse and buggy to a modern F-1 race car. Big difference...
OK. I'll be sure to tell all those agencies that someone on radio reference wants them to know they are all doing it wrong.
BinaryMode
Blondie Once Said To Call Her But Never Answerd
This was 25 years ago.
Today, with the advent of Shodan or Censys or massscan, etc coupled with unbelievable and unprecedented technology at the consumer's grasp, you can think a system out, but it'll always be hackable. EVERYTHING is hackable. Making a system from what is now (P25 and the likes) which is a pretty decent system into a more complex mechanism and then interfacing all that to the Internet is like overthinking simple transportation with the automobile and adding waaay more fancy crap that can and WILL go out and cost A LOT to repair.
I'm not talking about the old days.
With how interconnected everything is, all one has to do is hit a fiber cable and it's all done for. All someone has to do is query the database server wrong, open the wrong e-mail, etc and you now wind up in the evening news... Again, introducing more complexity to an otherwise fairly straight forward and robust system is foolish in my opinion.
If I wanted change to happen I'd lobby a few congressman/woman/its'. I'm just here for the low IQ bipedal chimp pant-hoot...
mmckenna
I ♥ Ø
Right, everything is eventually hackable.
The trick is to make it so difficult that it takes an incredible amount of time and resources to do it.
And by that time, someone has rolled the keys and you'd have to start all over from zero.
I can hack an analog radio system way faster than anyone has come close to hacking a digital system.
On a consumer/small business level, absolutely.
On the public safety side, it's a bit more complex than that. Trying to oversimplify the system that you see as a consumer/hobbyists/end user doesn't work when looking at the systems used by higher tier users. You seem to be under the impression that all this operates over the consumer internet. While that is used in places, it's not used as primary for any critical links. The standards used on these networks are probably a lot more robust than you are thinking.
P25 systems already use IP for linking sites. That's been happening for a long time. Alternate links are part of these designs, fiber, microwave, and other means are used.
The agency I work for has multiple fiber connections all taking different paths to different POPs. We have alternate carriers as backup. Redundant router pairs, redundant power systems, redundant links. It's not uncommon for fiber to be impacted by fire, trees down, backhoes, other issues. The design of the systems keeps our end users from even noticing such an issue. It simply goes in the report as "loss of redundancy on link XXX" No one gets their panties in a wad over it because there are multiple levels of backup that are all sized appropriately to take on the lost capacity without any impact to operations.
Can it be broken? Sure, but it takes a lot more than someone opening the wrong e-mail, or tripping over an extension cord. Fortunately we have people that understand how these systems work. They work every day to find weaknesses and address them before they become an issue. And if an issue does happen? They are right there ready to reroute service.
TETRA is coming to the US. the company I work for, we just implemented a TERTA system that covers about 45% of the state of MS. fully owned and implemented by us exclusively
MTS2000des
5B2_BEE00 Czar
TETRA has been here for two decades. It's old technology and in other parts of the world, is being slowly phased out in favor of broadband/LTE/5G.
Plus it's iDEN wide as far as bandwidth goes, making adjacent channel use a pain.
Ubbe
Member
Tetra is still a good 2 -way radio system if redundancy and critical operations are needed and airports and industries will use it for many years to come. It's our public safety that's going to switch to their own 700MHz LTE system very soon, and I believe most public safety in EU will also move from Tetra, as they want high data bandwidth to support a lot of data heavy applications. Tetra have 4 timeslots in a 25KHz channel but as with most systems you'll need a guard channel and cannot use an adjacent channel in the same small geographical location.
The Tetra system used here for buses and subway/trams in greater Stockholm use adjacent channels that are on opposite sides of town. They even reuse the same channel more often than in conventional systems as it is a roaming intense system that keeps mobiles close to a tower, but it is also built for roaming. It sends all pertinent data in advance to the site it is going to roam to and are ready when the mobile makes that access request and the switch are instant without any glitch in the speech audio. The system keeps constantly track of three other sites with coverage to a mobile to see which one that are the most suitable to use for a handover.
/Ubbe
The Tetra system used here for buses and subway/trams in greater Stockholm use adjacent channels that are on opposite sides of town. They even reuse the same channel more often than in conventional systems as it is a roaming intense system that keeps mobiles close to a tower, but it is also built for roaming. It sends all pertinent data in advance to the site it is going to roam to and are ready when the mobile makes that access request and the switch are instant without any glitch in the speech audio. The system keeps constantly track of three other sites with coverage to a mobile to see which one that are the most suitable to use for a handover.
/Ubbe
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