General Info about TETRA

The TETRA Standard

TETRA is an open standard developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). The main purpose of the TETRA standard was to define a series of open interfaces, as well as services and facilities, in sufficient detail to enable independent manufacturers to develop infrastructure and terminal products that would fully interoperate with each other as well as meet the needs of traditional PMR user organisations. The TETRA standard is in practice, a suite of standards covering different technology aspects, for example, air interfaces, network interfaces and its services and facilities. Because TETRA is an evolving standard it has been developed in Releases (phases) known as TETRA Release 1 and TETRA Release 2. Although the prime responsibility of ETSI is to develop standards for Europe, many of its standards are also adopted world-wide, as evidenced by the uptake of GSM, the first wireless technology standard to be developed by ETSI. Similarly, TETRA has already been deployed in many regions and nations outside Europe, resulting in TETRA becoming a truly global standard. Even though both TETRA Releases have been completed, work continues within ETSI Technical Committee (TC) TETRA to further enhance the standard thus satisfying new user requirements as well as gleaning the benefits of new technology innovations. Outside of Europe the ETSI TETRA Standard has been formerly adopted in China and South Korea and many other regions of the world.

SDS (Short Data Service) Status Message


SDS (Short Data Service) Text Message

The Short Data Service can provide up to 256 bytes of data, which can be used for basic status messaging, location information such as that provided by the TETRA Location Information Protocol (LIP) and free form text message applications in either ‘point to point’ or ‘point to multipoint’ call set-up configurations. Because of the relative short duration of each data message, this service is supported on TETRA control channel TDMA time slots.

Circuit Switched Mode


Packet Data and Multi Slot Packet Data (TETRA IP-Connection)

The packet data service can be supported on one TDMA time slot with a gross protected bit rate of 4800 bits/s or multiple TDMA time slots up to a maximum of four. The use of multiple TDMA time slots is often referred to as bandwidth on demand and can be used to increase gross protected data throughput up to 19.2 kbits/s, thus increasing the number of non-voice applications that can be supported on TETRA. Multislot Packet Data is the IP data service using multiple timeslots.

Advantages in using TETRA