Critical communications in the North part II: Ready, set, Finnish…

Last week Group Call looked at Norwegian plans to replace their current TETRA network with a next generation 4G LTE/5G. This week we turn our attention to its eastern neighbour Finland.

On the face of it the Finns are doing much the same that the UK, Norwegians and other countries are doing: replacing an existing TETRA network with a 4G LTE/5G based critical communications network. Finland is a little different from Norway and Britain however, who both have existing TETRA systems provided by Motorola. Finland’s TETRA network is owned and run by the Government through a wholly owned special purposes company called the ‘State Security Networks Group’ which is responsible to the Finnish Prime Minister’s office.

The ‘State Security Networks Group’ is based in the city of Espoo, which is the second largest city in Finland and just west of the capital Helsinki. Its purpose is to provide secure and reliable information and communications technology services to public authorities and organisations involved in national security. In practice, the four biggest users of the ‘Virve’ TETRA network are the Fire and Rescue Service, the police, ambulance service and the Finnish military.
Unlike in Britain, the largest user of the Finnish critical communications network is the fire and rescue service, and not the police. In Finland there are approximately 5,000 professional firefighters spread across 22 rescue services. These services don’t only provide fire-fighting services, they also perform other types rescue operations as well as ambulance/emergency medical services. They often also have responsibility for accident prevention, damage mitigation and fire inspections; safety education and advice; rescue operations and civil defence. Finland also has around 15,000 voluntary firefighters organised into over 600 voluntary fire brigades. In addition, the country has 150 industrial fire brigades which operate in large industrial complexes and are usually staffed by specially trained workers from the sites.
The State Security Networks Group also offers other data communication services in addition to the ‘Virve’ network. ‘Turvallisuusverkko’ is a high-readiness network handling communication between Finland’s national security organisations and the critical elements of government. The company also offers wireless and fixed IP services including end-to-end managed information systems and data communication environs; and a ‘terminals’ service, which means it sells and services TETRA radio terminals, which are used in the Virve network. It is the authorised Finnish dealer and service point for Airbus radio terminals.

The company also provides tools for improved situational awareness and leadership, and secure co-location and capacity services for data centres.
When it comes to providing a new 4G LTE critical comms service to the whole of the country, Finland has some challenges which are surprisingly similar to those faced by the UK. Finland is a big country with a small population of 5.5 million concentrated in the major cities and urban areas in the south and west. Large areas of northern and eastern Finland are made up of forest and lots of lakes and rivers. In fact, 10% of Finland’s geographical area is water. While the forests and waterways may be teeming with wildlife, including billions of mosquitoes, they are largely empty of people and that presents a big challenge.

In the far North of the country Finland faces a problem we don’t in the UK. The average number of people living in Finnish Lapland is five per square mile, but this includes people from towns and cities. Between these, there are large areas with almost no people at all. There are also large areas where there are simply no people and therefore no power supply.

The Finns are trying to figure out what coverage and capacity needs to be available for set incident levels and have a plan for what to do if it is not. 4G networks are quite widespread in Finland, and more geographical coverage is still being built, but the available capacity is often low where the population density is low, i.e. in most parts of the country.

The existing TETRA network covers the whole country in quite a novel way — using huge masts. Where Airwave in the UK has around 4,000 masts covering nearly all 94,000 square miles of the country, the Virve network in Finland manages to cover 130,000 square miles of land and quite a bit of the Baltic Sea with only around 1400 masts. Size really does make a difference when it comes to mobile radio base stations, with the Finns letting masts soar on average up to 80m into the air versus the normal maximum for the UK of 25m. Surprisingly the Finns also have five TETRA base stations on the cost of Estonia, helping to provide coverage over the Gulf of Finland.

State Security Networks Group Development Manager, Ari Toivonen, outlined future planning for replacing the TETRA network with 4GLTE/5G including coverage and resilience.

“We are still in the early stages compared to ESN, but timeline is clear, and more ambitious than in the UK. We started the procurement process in March to buy a Radio Access Network (RAN) as a service and to buy and build our own core network, and we hope to sign these contracts by the end of the year. We expect to see the core equipment in operation and us starting to provide mobile broadband services on the second half of next year, less than a year after signing contracts.”

With procurements underway, the companies in the running for the contracts can’t be named, but it’s expected that the RAN contract will go to one of the three commercial mobile operators.

“Mission Critical Push To Talk (MCPTT) will take longer, and will form part of the second phase of the project beginning next year.” continues Ari. “We aim to have the whole system procured, tested and implemented, and devices and mission critical applications appearing before users start to migrate to the new network in 2022.”

Following ESN in the UK, FirstNet in the United States and South Korea, Finland is looking to explore 4G mission critical PTT. It’s not yet started the formal discussion with industry but is looking at issuing a Request For Information or ‘RFI’ in the late autumn of this year to understand what industry thinks. Industry engagement will happen before that on an equal basis with all those interested.

Ari Toivonen continued, “Migration to the system by all users will take around three years. As in the UK, it is not possible to force users onto the new system, but we will have a campaign to encourage the swap to happen.” The current plans for the Virve network are for it to be switched off earliest in 2025 assuming all users have migrated onto the 4G service by then.
The team developing the new network is quite small scale for now, compared to a mature programme like ESN, with a core team consisting of only around 12 people.

In another echo of Britain, the user expectations of any mission critical 4G network replacing the existing TETRA system is quite high. The Finns say they currently have the best TETRA network in the world — it matches the UK with 96–97 per cent by geography — and it’s a high barrier to reach, with some interesting challenges are already emerging.

The user base currently has around 41,000 subscribers who interestingly use a lot more SDS messages for location updates than we would here in Britain, on average totalling 8 million messages per day. As well as the emergency services and the military, the Finnish network last year took on on-board the railways, who have switched from using the European standard Global System for Mobile Communications Railway (GSM-R) to using TETRA after receiving an exemption allowing this from the European Commission.
As most Group Call readers will know, the lower the radio spectrum frequency used the further signals will carry, which makes the 700MHz and 800MHz frequencies particularly useful for 4G and 5G in more rural or remote areas. In the UK EE adopt the same approach for ESN, often deploying the 800MHz band in addition to the higher frequencies it has use of in less densely populated areas.

Traditionally, these frequencies were used for TV broadcasts across Europe but by 2020 most countries in the European Union will have freed this spectrum for use by mobile networks, making them much more useful. Russia, however, has not made the move and still uses these frequencies for TV. This makes the use of 700MHz and 800MHz frequencies difficult without causing interference near the over the 800-mile-long border Finland shares with Russia.

One solution would be to use higher frequency bands. However, there is a limit on how far the higher frequency signals will go which in turn means having to build more base stations.

Other border areas also need thought. The Finns now have sharing arrangements in place for TETRA networks with neighbours Sweden and Norway, and this has naturally set user expectations for the new network. International roaming arrangements will need to be in place for 4G critical communications to cover these common border areas and the islands in the Baltic, especially since they are covered by the Schengen agreement and its single jurisdiction approach to international travel.

Finland is making progress though and on 1 February this year updated the law to allow pre-emption on commercial networks as well as national roaming for critical communications users.

Group Call wishes our Finnish colleagues good luck and we look forward to seeing the result of the progress they are making in the coming months and years.