Home Office seeks advice on Police Radio omnishambles The Home Office has announced a new twist in the sorry tale of the Emergency Services Network saga and is asking suppliers to consult on a procurement framework that started two years ago. The government department has published a Prior Information Notice (PIN) for a tender to replace the Airwave communications equipment used …
In France, all over, you see Gendarmerie, or Police Municiple (Muncipal Police for non French speakers) on their uniforms and vehicles , and it doesnt matter which department they are from.
No silly Whatevershire police badges/letterheads etc, the French know where they are, why do the Anglais need to be informed?
In France, all over, you see Gendarmerie
The French Gendarmerie are a uniformed military organization, not a civilian one, and come under the joint authority of the ministries of defence and interior, which is very different to the organization of the British police. I don't think people in the UK would be happy to be policed by an armed military group, who are essentially soldiers. The Police Nationale are civil servants.
just down here in the SW we have Devon & Cornwall Police, Somerset & Avon Police and Dorset so that's 3 different forces, (plus British Transport Police and Mod Police) madness. The policing in D&C is no different to that of Somerset & Avon or Dorset, apart from Plymouth & Bristol the rest of the region is pretty much rural, we don't need 3 forces!
When the salesmen, lobbyists and consultants have more power than the engineers.
When fielding something very complex, where the consequences of failure include people dying, it is important to design and test it well. Only engineers can do this, and they need to be good ones. There are probably several hundred of them in the UK.
MOD UK are looking to replace Bowman:
http://www.landmobile.co.uk/news/mod-project-morpheus-requires-experts-and-companies-for-bowman-military-comms-replacement
Not sure if the Police Forces would want to take it on! Do the police want/need a device that will work over the LTE networks or would they be happy with the existing radio? They could then have another device with a decent screen that ran a data connection via 2/3/4/5g which wouldn't need to be hardened to survive rolling about the ground with a suspect (because they're all innocent initially...).
Typical for the Government to ask for technology that doesn't exist and make unreasonable demands on it that stretch the very limits of the physics involved.
Radio is NOT the same as Cellular transmission regardless of what some "Luvvie" said at the last charity event.
Police or other emergency radio is usually much higher broadcast power than any cellphone technology, both at the handset and at the tower. That's why it works inside buildings when commercial phones struggle to get any signal. If you had that power in a cellular handset it would overwhelm the entire cell.
Conversely, Radio does not do Data in the sense of what you can send or receive on a smartphone.
There are no commercially available "phones" yet that do both in a single product.
Writing an RFP for technology that does not already exist is a recipe for disaster and/or financial ruin or both. Expecting that your RFP will bring a "COTS" solution when there is no such technology is the height of ignorance.
But España has for years had a working TETRAPOL radio service, with a useable data-rate, allowing both voice & for example, a suspects fingerprints to be sent back to base. The entire roll-out of AIRWAVE/TETRA was done whilst ignoring the existence of the French alternative. Was this so that Moto (NSA) had the root crypto keys for all EU blue-light traffic?
For UK LTE 3G/4G priority traffic, there first has to be some sort of national infrastructure, and UK cell service coverage in 2015 is still sh!te. I couldn't get ANY signal outside Stanstead Airport, roaming with a major EU SIM. No voice. No data? 2015??
" I couldn't get ANY signal outside Stanstead Airport, roaming with a major EU SIM. No voice. No data? 2015??"
I knew we should have left private sector competition to sort out our mobile infrastructure, rather than having a single nationalised operator to deliver bitstreams pretty much everywhere (similar to the nationalised utility Openreach), with operators competing on services and tariffs on top of the universally available uniformly-wholesaled mobile bitstream.
Or did I get that wrong?
It is totally unnecessary for our inconsequential little island to be a pioneer and endure all the costs and delays and problems that go along with being an early adopter of new technology.
Let one of the major world powers pay for the development and do all the beta testing. Look at what is already in use elsewhere in the world, and choose a system that has been well tested and most closely resembles what you want. Accept that you may not get every feature you want and it might not be the bleeding edge of technology.
The emergency services would get a reliable system and it would save the taxpayers millions of pounds.
What could possibly go wrong with this plan?
This appears to be "The British (government) Disease"
Spend decades trying to get a system to work, then scrap it for the next new shiny.
Which (on past experience) will also take decades to get to work, and will probably ignore all lessons learned in getting the last one working.
1. System load (variable, but must degrade gracefully under full load)
2. Analog vs digital (advantages to both, but the messages MUST get through if at all possible)
3. Infrastructure cost (leveraging GSM infrastructure is attractive, independent infrastructure more secure but costly)
4. Profit must be made
5. We need it yesterday and for free, please.
Good luck. I predict it will be late, unsuitable for purpose and several times over budget.
1. System load (variable, but must degrade gracefully under full load)
Why must it degrade? Why can't it be scaled to operate normally under full load? That full load scenario would be indicative of an event that requires fully working comms.
2. Analog vs digital (advantages to both, but the messages MUST get through if at all possible)
What are the advantages of analogue? It's harder to secure, harder to upgrade, harder to manage - I love my turntable but this is 2015. Any functional communications system must be digital.
3. Infrastructure cost (leveraging GSM infrastructure is attractive, independent infrastructure more secure but costly)
The 90's called and they want their tech back. What kind of worthwhile video streaming of an incident or secure data exchange are you going to perform at 9600 baud? If I'm using a handheld device to scan faces in a crowd for a terrorist suspect I want it real-time. If the person I'm questioning is quite likely to kill me, I'd like to know right now.
4&5 Profit, cost, timescales.
The organisations selling this kit and the surrounding services have spent fortunes developing it and will continue to spend a fortune supporting it. The shareholders who invested the money to build the business will expect to make some kind of return - if the don't the business will fail. By all means run the service from within a public body but the kit will still be expensive and the experts will still want paying. People with 30 years of experience in this field won't take a public sector job that pays poorly out of the goodness of their hearts while simultaneously coming under attack from politicians and the press for daring to want a pension.
If you want it quick - buy something that already exists and don't mess with it. Sack the ridiculous middle management folk who ruin specs just to justify their jobs and show that they had some form of input to the process. Asking for stupid stuff that can't be done isn't the mark of a razor sharp procurement professional.
1. Anything you build will get overloaded at some point. Murphy's law. Nobody designs a system like this for the maximum possible load (think 9/11 in NYC), it's just too expensive to pay for capacity you don't use daily.
2. Agree that it will probably be digital, but digital doesn't degrade gracefully in low SNR conditions like analog does (which, among other reasons, is why ATC comms are still analog AM), and encrypted digital does even worse (because you need to recover crypto sync as well as voice codec sync after a dropout)
3. My fault...by "GSM", I meant "wireless telephone infrastructure". If there was a way to piggyback onto that, you'd have a readymade network available to you. Prioritize police traffic over civilian mobile calls. But they'll probably end up building a complete new nationwide network...the best you can hope for is colocation on existing towers.
The system will be late, WAY over budget and will be found to underperform (perhaps badly). At least, all the ones built in the US have been. The sales people will over promise, the engineering managers will assure us that everything will be fine, and the odds are still that the system will fall on its face when the first really heavy load hits it.
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