Brit plods' post-TETRA radio omnishambles comes home to roost The £1.2bn emergency services contract which The Register flagged up as an omnishambles six months ago has now, as we predicted, collapsed. After a year-long bidding process the government had whittled the tenders down to two companies: EE and O2. Now O2 has pulled out as a result of Telefonica selling the network to Three’s …
There's not a lot of money to be made, and if you tag the emergency services comms on the back of the public service, when that goes down there's not an independent network to rely on. Oh dear. We do of course know how reliable 4G services are, especially outside main population centres.
Police cars will now be equipped with a box of pigeons to summon help with to cover the gaps in coverage perhaps?
Omnishambles. You've got it in one.
Coat, there's a PMR handheld in the pocket.
Our local police do actually use PMR446 & PBR. PBR as there is a frequency that all of the smaller shops (and larger shops security bods) use to get in touch with the local police immediately bypassing the time the regional call centre.
I'm given to understand that the reason for this was that the regional call centre was logging calls for the right shops in the wrong towns (sometimes the wrong county) and both the local shops and local police got a bit fed up with this and quietly did something about it. I have a sneaking suspicion that the local shops simply have bought half a dozen extra radios and a fleet charger which is on "temporary" loan to the local police station.
They also monitor one of the PMR frequencies at local events, which is particually handy if your staff at said events. Being a cynic though I do wonder how much most crime being reported by radio has on our towns (exceedingly low) crime figures since presubably a lot of calls are dealt with locally rather than being logged as a crime through the call centres.
I imagine moving to digital would allow more radios to use the same bit of spectrum, and might make them physically smaller as well.
Sadly, no. The digital radios issued to the Police are larger, less effective, and suffer from very nasty distortion. Being digital, they either work or don't work - there's no "fringe" operation. There are huge swathes of the country - including within cities - where the radios simply don't work. TETRA was a poor solution to a problem that didn't really exist!
Incidentally, the flooding of the TETRA system during the Kings Cross Tube Station fire led to many unnecessary deaths because of the complete failure of the radio system.
NBFM is a good option, but -bizarrely - AM is actually better! For the same reason that aeronautical radio is still AM - operators can hear two (or more) calling stations at the same time. This has proved to be crucial in aeronautical situations. FM prevents this - the strongest signal always wins (see "capture effect").
If they want reliable communications with efficient spectrum use, they should consider some form of SSB (single-sideband AM). The communication channel bandwidth is marginally smaller than for a Narrow Band FM signal, and intelligibility is similar. The technology is well known and has been manufactured and used since the 1950s. Modern DSP chippery makes modulation and demodulation of this mode child's play, and if privacy is wanted, there are many trivially simple scrambling schemes that can be used to deter the casual eavesdropper. Use of band I (50 - 80MHz) would assure good penetration into buildings and good range.
4G LTE is a complete and utter mess in this country. No company has anything approaching effective coverage, and the resistance of the public to the location of masts that they perceive as "dangerous to health" guarantees that coverage will continue to be sporadic - even in cities. It's NOT the solution.
TETRA works sporadically - particularly when there's a lot of traffic. It's a poor solution. The "fairly nasty UHF radiation" was trivial. When they used Band I, the power levels were significantly lower - so this is probably the best range of frequencies to consider to minimise Plod's exposure... However, sterilising the current generation of the "Police Service" would do us all a favour!
Isn't 4G particularly vulnerable to jamming?
Criminals could have a field day with a bunch of cheap Chinese import jammers bought over the internet with practically no traceability, knowing the police would be commincationless even if they tried to use their normal mobile phones.
I think you underestimate the abilities of the Home Office, the Police and other government agencies.
Jamming police radios, even with a "cheap chinese jammer" of some sort, would put you on the wrong end of an attempting to pervert the course of justice change and you'd be looking at 6 months in jail. That's no joke. But at least you'd never be called for jury service.
So a guy drops a packet into a trash bin next to a police station and, say, three hours later a timer goes off and isolates the police station from the rest of the world. Nah! Nobody could find a way to abuse that! And nobody would dare, as it's so easy to catch the criminals!</sarcasm>
Dropping it in a trash bin next to a police station with a timer? That's probably better than my idea of glueing big neodymium magnets to a bunch of them, then surreptitiously sticking them to the underneath of patrol cars... with your idea of timers so suddenly at a predetermined time a bunch of police cars go 'dark'.
I'm not a criminal, I just have an imagination - like Nathan Fillion's character in Castle :)
Er - ok. You all make several assumptions. And you seem to think that perhaps 4G or AM SSB is more robust in the presence of jamming than TETRA. And you forget that the TETRA base station is not necessarily in the cop shop or car or that there may be more than one of them, or ...
"
I think you underestimate the abilities of the Home Office, the Police and other government agencies.
"
While I think you are overestimating the ability. Sure, if a jammer is operated frequently from the same location the perp will be caught, but a person using a jammer infrequently from different locations is reasonably safe if they take moderate precautions, even if they carry the jammer with them. In fact that's probably safer than planting it somewhere and treating it as a disposable item, because in that case the jammer will be found and subjected to forensic analysis (fingerprints, DNA, where it was purchased etc.), which stands a better chance of tracing who had it than a radio D.F. hunt.
Latency might be too high "Don't Shoot" becomes "Shoot"
It's VOIP only, no native voice mode, which increases latency
No Peer to Peer mode.
Has Priority been implemented on EE, so ordinary users (e.g. video streaming) can be dropped as needed?
It's not ready as a system to replace Tetra.
I see this "lost word" latency issue mentioned a lot in relation to VoIP.
Why can't the software/radio buffer what is said between the button press and establishing the connection and then transmit the message in it's entirety? The idea that you press the button, but can't speak for some arbitrary period of time depending on any number of conditions seems like bad design.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how this is an issue.
May I offer new and as yet untried, (at least by the Home Office and the police) solutions? Semaphore stations and hill top beacons. Combined with the previously suggested pigeons a complete future proof solution.
Ps, I wanted to add the WTF and joke icons but sadly I am limited to just one
bah, you kids are always in such a rush these days. Why can't they just write letters. The infrastructure is already in place (use it or lose it!) and everyone likes receiving letters. They could fail over to cleft sticks in hazardous conditions and the format supports pictures ones who can't read.
"bah, you kids are always in such a rush these days. Why can't they just write letters."
No can do.
They're selling the Post Office so it won't be too long before the Investment Wonkers (sp?) buying it get HM Gov to remove the 'deliver everywhere' clause to turn it into a 'deliver eventually' service, so if your cat goes missing in Loch Lothian you'll have to book it in advance ... "Dear Sarge, we're having a burglary next Friday in Inverness, if you could send a constable to assist ...Oh, and while I'm at it, there's a spontaneous riot planned in Glasgow on the 14th ..."
The mobile phone networks are a bag of bollocks for us mere mortals, so expecting the emergency services to rely on them as their only means of communication is fucking terrifying!
I base this on my frequent experiences of seeing "No Service" or an unusable 1-or-2 unusable 'blobs' of 2G on my phone whilst inside many-a-building, worryingly even in or near large city centres where mobile network operators' coverage maps confidently claim excellent coverage inside and out.
TETRA may cost more to run, but if it works better than this piss-poor effort EE/O2/Three/Voda have managed up to now, then stop wasting £100000s (more?) talking about changing it, and use the money instead for refreshing TETRA.
I'm not of the opinion that "we always do it better in the USA" than everyone else, but in this case I have to wonder what they were thinking over there. Over here we don't have a lot of problems with police communications. In urban areas, police use 800 MHz trunked systems, the newer of which have full encryption. And even without encryption not a lot of people have correctly programmed trunk tracker radios that can listen in.
Smaller forces generally use radios at about 155 MHz which offer good coverage. If terrain is more difficult, 55 MHz radios are still used (such as by the California Highway Patrol in more mountainous parts of the state). They all work pretty well - certainly more reliably than the cell phone network does.
You're really looking to have trouble if there is a widespread emergency as cell phone networks are famous for getting overloaded when that happens. Last summer, there was a fire along the freeway (motorway for those across the pond), and a lot of idiots were taking pictures of the smoke and emailing them to their friends. This traffic overloaded the network to the point where people with actual emergencies could not get through. I'm sure they will set up special channels for police use only to help prevent that, but I suspect they're still going to have issues sharing a network with the public.
There are a lot of really good radio solutions available for law enforcement that don't involve using cell towers. I hope your police over there will look into those before they commit to something that really does sound like a total omnishambles.
>You're really looking to have trouble if there is a widespread emergency as cell phone networks are famous for getting overloaded when that happens.
Indeed. That's also why cellular allows certain user groups to preempt others. A blue light user would always be given capacity - other users would be thrown off to provide it.
Just FYI - Airwave handsets can operate fine in the direct mode a'la walkie-talkie style. You can use vehicles as base stations to relay through so in a small sub-division, you could feasibly run the entire network direct mode with enough vehicles around to provide coverage, or certainly whilst away from your vehicle, you'll still probably be in range.
Not taking into account physical barriers, etc.
So it's not totally dependent on trunked.
Airwave costs HMG £450M per year for the 3ES, moving to ESMCP is figure to save them almost £80M per year over 15 years which they can roll back into more bobbies on the beat, more ambulances, or more Brasso for Trumpton. Under the contract signed by Gordon Brown in 2000 as the PFI with Airwave, that cost rises towards the end of the contract, dramatically, which it is doing.
The contract with the network will be to cover 98% of this sceptred isle by the go live date. And they already have plans to massively bolster 4G as part of the government's plans to make it available to everyone, so there's a two edged sword here.
There is a lot in the bidding process to extend the existing network coverage to places not deemed economic for the network operator to ensure we get coverage.
As for bandwidth - Motorola have already demonstrated a system where the ESN portion of 4G network use can be ramped up in an emergency without effecting regular users, and vice versa, thus isolating the two operations on one network.
There are a few apps and issues to resolve before go-live, but since that's 18months away, it's not insurmountable.
What you have to remember is that we in the UK will be the leaders in this technology and other countries will follow our lead as they did with TETRA. EE recognise this and are keen to be part of it.
The only concern for the whole project is updating 45000 vehicles in a 24-36 month period when there are not enough skilled and most importantly competent installer to carry out the work. When Airwave was rolled out the Public Safety world was turned upside down and well established radio engineers were ignored in favour of anyone that could hold a blowtorch and wrap wired in insulting tape, with alarming consequences to the vehicles they bunged kit into. The Home Office don't want that to happen this time around so have set a high standard requirement. Getting engineers trained and accredited in time should be possible if they can be found and paid a sensible rate for the job.
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