Project Challenge: Airports rely on communications as a crucial part of their business to ensure both passenger safety and handling processes. This resulted in a need for a TETRA system to allow secure communications between departments.

However, with airports being some of the most challenging environments due to their 24/7 operation, rolling out and replacing an existing network demands impeccable planning.

During the migration to the TETRA network, gateways co-existed to prevent downtime of communications. The migration was completed without any negative impact on operations.

Project Challenge: The TETRA radio infrastructure at the airports is based on TetraNode High End open industry standard and high availability server platforms. These are specifically designed for carrier-grade telecommunications with excellent system performance and >99.9% availability.

The largest airport, O.R. Tambo, experienced challenges with the tunnels, basements and baggage departments. Therefore, a Distributed Antenna System was implemented, directly integrated to the TETRA network, allowing communications to take place in areas with expected low signal. The airports collectively use 34 carriers and twelve TetraNode Exchanges with 9000 users at present, but with the capacity to support many more.

All airports are functioning off a fibre backbone, which allows for inter-site connectivity and allows all airports, airlines and staff to communicate via the TETRA network.

Benefits:

• Full geo redundant architecture offering the highest level of redundancy and resilience

• 99.999% uptime and availability

• Full inter-airport communications with a fully redundant IP/MPLS network