The PMR market can be divided into three broad tiers; consumer/light commercial, public safety and business-critical professional. Different products and standards address different tiers. The DMR standard crosses all three tiers.

DMR, MPT 1327 and dPMR - Business-Critical Professional. This is the main market for DMR products and sits in between the consumer/light industrial and mission critical/public safety market categories. It covers organisations which aren’t engaged in mission-critical work but which can still benefit from features usually associated with mission-critical systems. Businesses in this category include transportation, utilities, construction, manufacturing and private security. Small municipality and education users also typically fall in this tier. The ETSI DMR standard is the relevant digital radio standard targeted to this market sector, providing improved spectral efficiency, advanced voice control and integrated IP data services in licensed bands for high-power communications.

Analogue radios, for both conventional use and trunked systems (including MPT 1327, SmartNet, LTR, Passport and SmartZone) have been used in business-critical applications for years. As manufacturers introduce high-power digital radios to the professional tier market, however, users have a choice. They can either opt for a communications system built to a protocol such as dPMR which is based on 6.25kHz Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) technology and has its roots in the consumer and light commercial markets, or they can leverage the benefits of DMR which using TDMA technology has been designed for the business critical user from the outset.

The two technologies are not compatible or interoperable. The DMR Association believes that two-slot TDMA based DMR is the best fit for most professional, business-critical, applications as it brings the following benefits:

• Predictable doubling of capacity in your existing 12.5kHz licensed channels
• Efficient use of infrastructure equipment
• Longer battery life and greater power efficiency
• Ease of use and creation of data applications
• System flexibility through simultaneous voice and data calls
• Advanced control features
• Superior audio performance
• Security of supply through a fully open, well established, widely backed standard

As a result of these benefits DMR is today the best established digital technology in the market today for professional users and is the clear choice for organizations looking to deploy new digital two-way radio systems, or to upgrade their existing analogue radios to digital.

DMR and Unlicensed PMR - Consumer and Light Commercial.

Unlicensed PMR covers consumer products and low-power commercial applications, using a maximum of 0.5Watt RF power and with other technical limitations.

Although the DMR standard includes specifications for products built for the unlicensed market it is unlikely that there will be DMR products launched in this category as DMR is optimised for more sophisticated implementations required by professional users. The ETSI dPMR digital standard which uses 6.25kHz FDMA technology has characteristics which are more suited to the requirements of this market segment.

DMR, Tetra and P25 - Mission-Critical Public Safety.

This market category is defined by mission-critical communications, security and interoperability needs and the use of trunking. In countries covered by ETSI the market is mainly served by the Terrestrial Trunked Radio (Tetra) Standard, which supports multiple talk groups on multiple frequencies, including one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many calls. Tetra is a digital standard that uses four-slot TDMA in 25kHz channels. In the U.S., the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) has established Project 25 to define similar capabilities for the mission-critical market. Unlike Tetra, Project 25 uses 12.5kHz channels. Project 25 Phase II will use two-slot TDMA capabilities similar to DMR. Both Tetra- and Project 25-compliant systems rely on sophisticated infrastructure to achieve the fault-tolerant reliability and advanced calling functionality required in public safety and other mission-critical applications. Trunked and conventional DMR solutions can offer a lower cost, lower functionality alternative to Tetra and P25 in certain sectors of this market.