UK Police Radios will be killed soon, but is 4G really the Solution?
In less than 18 months' time the police radio network will be switched off. There is no obvious replacement and the looming Omni shambles is turning into a bonanza for Arquiva, the only company brave enough to offer a solution.
Peter Neyroud CBE, former head of the National Policing Improvement Agency and now at the University of Cambridge lecturing in criminology told us: “They moved to do what they are doing far too late. I told Labour to get on with it in 2009.”
The British police and the other emergency services use a system called Airwave. This uses a technology called Tetra (Terrestrial Trunked Radio) which is half way between a mobile phone system and a walkie talkie. It’s an ancient technology and very poor at mobile data, which runs at 7.2kbs. There is a standard to boost that to 700kbps but it has never been implemented. Instead the plan is to replace it with 4G.
The new £1.2bn Emergency Services Network contract will replace the previous £2.9bn digital radio communications supplied by one company, Airwave.
Airwave revolutionised policing in many rural areas but more recently has been criticised for being too costly as it was set at a fixed price, with escalation, more than a decade ago. Peter Neyroud, who negotiated the initial contracts, told us that as police budgets have been squeezed and the cost of the Airwave contract has risen it’s become a more significant line item.
“It was never cheap,” said Neyroud, “but given what you were asking it to do it was always going to cost, “pointing out that it replaced a system of UHF and VHF that was incredibly patchy and unreliable.
Airwave was initially part of O2 but the company was taken over by Macquarie Group Limited, a private equity firm, and the prices to the emergency services reflected this. Neyroud told us that while the pricing was baked in from the start, Airwave doesn’t have much room to move as Macquarie ultimately has shareholders to service.
Devices made in low volumes for specialist use are also expensive. To those of us used to mobile phones, where you can get an Android device for under £100, a voice-only radio at thousands seems exorbitant. The plan to move to 4G sounds sensible but the people who actually use emergency communications have deep reservations.
So, keen to find something faster and affordable, the emergency services are looking to 4G. While Airwave does support full duplex, one of the most important features the emergency services want is push-to-talk, a walkie-talkie like service. And that is where the focus of making mobile fit for use by the emergency services has been.
There are systems in place to give emergency services priority but network congestion is still going to affect the ability of the backhaul infrastructure to cope. The Home Office issues licenses for the emergency services to set a bit on the SIM to enable MTPAS (Mobile Telecommunication Privileged Access Scheme), previously called ACCOLC (Access Overload Control), and still informally called that. There is a limited pool of MTPAS SIMs and the police force, which wants one has to get its mobile operator to fill in the paperwork for the Home Office to request it. The IMSI of the enabled SIM is registered with the network.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/08/airwave_tetra_switch_off_gov_services
