UK TETRA operator Dolphin has filed for administration in Britain for the second time in its six year existence. Its operations are in the hands of KPMG, who said they are actively trying to sell the business. “We urge any interested parties to contact us as soon as possible,” said a KPMG spokesman.
Dolphin, once the beachhead of TIW’s plan to ‘become the Nextel of Europe,’ spent US$500 to build and operate its network. The company filed for administration in 2001 and was sold to Qualcomm-backed Inquam for just £25M in June 2002; Inquam had hoped to persuade authorities to let it deploy CDMA in Dolphin’s TETRA spectrum. British regulators repeatedly rebuffed the effort and Dolphin has been unable to build a commercially viable business based on TETRA.
It’s no wonder, really. TETRA is dreadful for any number of reasons. First, it is YA (Yet Another) standard designed by committee. That approach has doomed many a fine intent (like X.400 and X.500, to name two) to utter irrelevance; while the standards committee argues over the market passes them by. Second, there is little, if any, choice in handsets, and different handsets don’t always interoperate with infrastructure from different manufacturers. For that matter, infrastructure from different manufacturers doesn’t always interoperate within a given network. And lest we forget, the TETRA folks were forever promising data services. Last I heard they are still promising.
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