Re: Still waiting
This case is particularly nuts because airwave worked and worked well, airwave ticked all the boxes for lessons learned from recent terror attacks, 4G could never ever even in the best case compete with airwave and the company bidding for the 4G contract simply *bought out the company running Airwave* so it could hike the prices to allow itself to win unopposed. Absolute bleeding insanity.
For good data services (which is what they currently lack) 4G would be excellent, provided it had the same geographical coverage. Currently it doesn't...
Regarding the take over of Airwave, if the Government were truly pissed at being taken for a ride it can compel the transfer of ownership. It could nationalise Airwave, at a price of the government's choosing... I doubt that'll happen though; Airwave is a dead product, unsuitable to the needs of today's emergency services.
To be honest, Airwave was always not ideal for the emergency services, but no one realised it at the time. For instance, for the police to let officers know what a suspect looks like they have to speak a description (which can be a surprisingly good way of doing it). Once upon a time the fact that that description could be securely broadcast on a widely receivable, well thought out voice network like Airwave seemed like a miracle.
However, with the advent of mobile phones (not even smart phones, really; MMS has been around for a while...), speaking a description now seems antiquated. It really would be useful to be sent a decent picture of a suspect.
Hitching a ride on smart phone and 3/4G network technology is about the only sane, affordable way of doing this. The only alternative is to do a bespoke network again (e.g. an Airwave 2), but to get it as functional as one would want it you'd basically just be developing a new mobile telephony standard from scratch for no good reason.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
