The ETSI Fellowship programme rewards individuals who have made an outstanding personal contribution to ETSI and raised its reputation in specific areas of standardisation. According to TCCA's chief executive, Tony Gray, Chater-Lea’s work, expertise and commitment are some of the reasons that today’s TETRA and 3GPP standards can be termed mission critical communications.
Chater-Lea has been a key member of the TETRA standards community since 1994, when he joined what was then ETSI RES6 WG6, the group that designed the TETRA security standards. He is currently vice chairman of ETSI TC TCCE, chairman of TCCE-WG4, and vice chair of 3GPP SA6, TCCE and TCCE-WG6. Within TCCA, Dave was a founder member of the SFPG in 1999 and has authored a significant proportion of the SFPG’s recommendations.
With a career spanning more than 35 years in mission-critical communications, Chater-Lea has tirelessly supported the development of ETSI standards and needs of the industry in ETSI, in TCCA, in CEPT, in 3GPP and in other industry fora, and is a highly respected member of the critical communications community globally.
TCCA has stated that he is probably the person who has done the most to evolve the standards from TETRA into critical communications over broadband. Although initially the TETRA community explored the concept of a ‘TETRA 3′ broadband standard, according to TCCA's Gray, Chater-Lea was one of the key proponents of the decision to adopt 3GPP LTE as the way forward to build on the massive investment in that technology.
Chater-Lea then led a technical approach to supporting the case for spectrum for broadband mission critical communications in Europe by working with user groups in the European Council Law Enforcement Working Party (LEWP) to determine the likely applications for broadband and user concentrations. This led to a scientifically derived calculation for spectrum needs, which was incorporated in CEPT Report 199 as well as an update to ETSI TR 102 628.
Chater-Lea chaired the joint ETSI-OMA meetings, which were the forerunner to the movement of the standardisation work into 3GPP. During these meetings, the combined group established an architectural model for a mission critical PTT solution. When it was decided that a 3GPP approach would be adopted instead of a three SDO standards model, Chater-Lea helped fight for appropriate terms of reference for the new 3GPP group SA6 which was instigated to develop Mission Critical standards in 3GPP. In SA6, Chater-Lea has made significant contributions to development of the Mission Critical set of standards now known as MCX, and is rapporteur (and major contributor) for the Interconnection and Migration standards work.
Meanwhile in WG4, Chater-Lea is leading the effort to develop the TETRA side of Interworking with the standards developed in 3GPP so that the TETRA standards are ready in time for the user communities’ needs for interoperation between existing TETRA systems and users operating on 3GPP systems.
Last year, Chater-Lea was awarded the Outstanding Contribution to Critical Communications award during the International Critical Communications Awards ceremony at Critical Communication World in Berlin.
