Airwave cop-comms to be 'brought to life' for Olympics The Home Office has announced a £39m deal to upgrade its Airwave emergency-services comms net in and around the 2012 Olympics venues, allowing it to handle "several thousand users within confined geographical locations". Contractors described the requirement as "challenging", but anticipated meeting it by Games time. The …
"Fulfilment of this contract will mean we have to bring to life a number of innovations, both from a technological and a network management point of view."
Is it only me that reads that as 'We've got the contract and have no idea how to implement it' ?
Good to see how our money is to be spent on a system that is yet to be developed by a company who are not sure what they need to develop and , most likely, paid for by a client who also has no idea what they are after.
Oh, hang on, sounds like Boris has been reading promotional leaflets again and has had another 'Big Idea'.
Well, look at it this way: If they're not laying on thick with the security circus, that probably wasn't necessairy in the first place (we already know it wasn't, exploding water my foot), meaning they lose face (what little they have left), so it's best to sing the party line like a little good canary.
And yes, the contractors are understandably happy to prolong the problem as much as possible citing ``technical difficulties'', except that there's a hard deadline of the actual olympics missing which would lose them lots of face unless they have some blackmail on the relevant bigwigs.
Realistically, though, airwave will have a certain capacity and it might very well not be enough for a city full of nervous plod, and if there's anyone with half-a-clue in the planning fray they'll have noticed the rather massive fail that is C2000 and its miserable underperformance in a large emergency services excercise in the Netherlands. So, amazingly, there are good solid reasons to at least look critically at the system and upgrade it a bit well before the capacity is actually needed.
There was a time when my life seemed untouched by cancer, certainly professionally in any case. In the last two months three of my Airwave using colleagues have been diagnosed with cancer and one of those three has just died. Statistically, I suppose, this is not unusual but it does make you think, as does the fact that the Comms engineers will not sit in a police car when the Airwave set is switched on!
It makes you wonder what is coming out of the antenna sites that are dotted around our towns.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
