The picturesque city of Valence in France has become the latest to choose TETRA-technology for its new city-wide radio communications network - and the latest to select Sepura terminals
The contract for the TETRA network was awarded to Sysoco, Sepura’s long-standing and highly-respected channel partner in France.
In common with many other cities and towns around the world, Valence has a variety of legacy analogue systems which have been added to, extended or enhanced at various stages. The result has been that integration and inter-communication with third party systems is very difficult to achieve consistently and that various agencies are using different systems and therefore find communication and co-ordination difficult. The same situation applied to a group of communities to the south of the city, known as Valence Agglo-Sud Rhone Alpes. The city authorities and the neighbouring authority decided to adopt a TETRA network to cover the entire area, with the twin aims of improving communications between the various services and agencies and also reducing the overall cost of ownership of the radio network.
The contract awarded to Sysoco, which is installing Thales infrastructure and a range of Sepura hand-portable radios, covers an area with a combined population of over 120,000 and a surface area of some 238km2 and thus represents a sizeable network. The first users on the system will be the municipal police, closely followed by the local government support services in Valence Agglo-Sud Rhone Alpes. The users will be equipped with a variety of Sepura hand-portables, with the majority of the fleet made up of the fully-featured, robust STP8000.
Commenting on the deal, Pierre Letta, Marketing Manager at Sysoco, said “We are very pleased to add Valence and Valence Agglo-Sud to the growing list of French metropolitan areas which have awarded their contract for a wide-area TETRA network to Sysoco. While the audio quality, display clarity and robustness of the Sepura hand-portables were important advantages, it was the lone worker capability and highly-sensitive GPS functionality which the customer found particularly attractive.
Emanuele Algieri, Sepura’s Regional Director for Southern Europe, added “This is another important contract win. Wide-area TETRA networks are, understandably, growing in popularity worldwide and Sysoco is ensuring that as many of these as possible in France are using Sepura terminals. We have an excellent relationship with Sysoco and look forward to celebrating many more such systems in the future.”
