What is Trunking Mobile Communication

Trunking mobile communication is a relatively economical and flexible mobile communication system developed in the 1970s. It represents an advanced stage of development of traditional private radio dispatch networks. Traditional private radio dispatch systems suffer from poor overall planning, mixed models and standards, numerous small networks with many base stations, narrow coverage, severe noise interference, and waste of frequency resources. Therefore, a new radio dispatch technology—trunking mobile communication—emerged as the times required. The communications industry both domestically and internationally generally recognizes that the 1980s-1990s were the decade when trunking mobile communication occupied a significant share of private radio communications, and it was an advanced communication system advancing side by side with cellular mobile communication. Countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, the four Nordic countries, Canada, and Australia have all extensively developed and used this system. It later experienced a period of decline. In recent years, trunking mobile communication systems have seen a resurgence.

The so-called trunking refers to the use of multiple wireless channels to serve numerous users, that is, applying the working mode of wired telephone trunk lines to radio communication systems, dynamically, automatically, rapidly, and optimally allocating the limited channels to all users of the entire system, so as to maximize the utilization of the system's channel frequency resources. It employs switching technology and computer technology to provide strong grouping capabilities for all users of the system. It can be said that a trunking mobile communication system is a special type of user Private Branch Exchange (PBX).

The first city in China to introduce trunking mobile communication systems was Shanghai. Trunking mobile communication is highly suitable for various professional departments, such as the military, public security, firefighting, transportation, flood control, electric power, railways, and finance, for group dispatch purposes. Subsequently, Beijing, Tianjin, Guangdong, Shenyang, and other regions successively developed trunking mobile communication services. With the development of local economies, some provincial capitals, municipalities directly under the central government, and eligible cities have gradually established 800MHz wireless trunking mobile communication systems and gradually opened up 800MHz trunking mobile communication services. Some local and non-telecommunications departments have already launched this service one after another.

According to incomplete statistics, there are 198 trunking mobile communication systems in the 450MHz and 800MHz frequency bands in operation in China, the vast majority of which are owned by non-telecommunications entities. During the "Ninth Five-Year Plan" period, the trunking networks planned to be established by various departments would require nearly 200,000 handheld terminals alone. For example, three entities including the flood control department of Henan Province invested 500-600 million yuan to establish a nationwide wireless paging network and trunking communication network. Several major oil fields, large enterprises, and agricultural reclamation departments in China also plan to expand or build their trunking communication networks. It is evident that trunking mobile communication has a very broad development prospect in China. At present, most of China's trunking communication systems are imported from abroad as complete units, with numerous brands and models. The leading products include those from Motorola (USA), UNIDEN (USA), and Nokia (Finland), as well as products from Hong Kong Taihe and European and Japanese manufacturers.

Trunking mobile communication systems designed and manufactured domestically in China have also been put into operation in recent years. Relevant authorities believe that there is an urgent need to select optimal models, unify equipment types, introduce prototype units for analysis and assimilation, cooperate with foreign companies to develop software and mobile terminals, first achieve breakthroughs in the high-volume mobile terminal and software technologies, then gradually realize the localization of base stations and switching control systems, raise the development starting point, and rapidly achieve economies of scale. It is reported that relevant authorities plan to form a group company to accelerate the development of China's trunking mobile communication systems.