'There has never been a realistic plan' for UK's £11B Emergency Services Network UK politicians have slammed progress on the £11 billion Emergency Services Network (ESN) – the replacement blue-light mobile voice and data system – saying the government is far too optimistic about its progress and the challenges ahead. Eight years into the delayed project – which has seen its budget swell by £6 billion – the …
Shows how much confidence Motorola have in ESN if they drop out at the cost fo £400m and and future payments to remain with Airwave - clearly they know it will be running for a lot longer and with more profits coming their way.
I wonder if our esteemed home office and looked elsewhere and seen what other countries have implemented and not thought - can we not implement that instead - assuming that other countries are using something more modern, reliable and future proof than airwave
So, the project is eight years overdue and current hardware will be obsolete in five.
They forecasted a major emergency comms project to only work for less than fifteen years before requiring everything to be replaced ?
Golly, with planning like that, who needs catastrophes ?
Tell you what, guys, I'll do you a favor : give me £15 billion now and I'll have something working by next year, promise. I don't know what yet, but for £15 billion I'll wrack my brain and get it to work.
The whole idea of the ESN is that it continues to operate if the mobile network infrastructure we mere mortals use becomes unavailable/unreliable or overloaded.
You cannot achieve that with a standard SIM contract on standard networks.
Just try using a mobile network (data) service in a busy environment like a packed football stadium or airport.
Now imagine everyone trying to use their phone at the same time...
"You cannot achieve that with a standard SIM contract on standard networks."
As noted elsewhere, priority access for emergency services etc has been a design feature since the days of GSM/PCN.
Does it work? Not clear. A good starting assumption for anything associated with BT and EE is that they won't work as required.
"Now imagine everyone trying to use their phone at the same time..."
Many people don't need to imagine it, and although some of the issues are down to congestion etc, other issues relate to things like coverage and to power supply backup in the infrastructure.
It's not looked good for a while.
Joined up thinking rather leaving it to the markets would have been a good way to go.
I think in NZ a mojitos part of the emergency services network runs over consumer cellular, however the telcos have roaming agreements and qos for priority
“ Emergency services’ voice and data communications get priority over other users when cellular networks are congested or degraded ”
https://ngcc.govt.nz/public-safety-network/cellular-services-2/
I think that's how ESN is intended to work in the UK - the physical network is provided by EE, using infrastructure already in place for consumers, but with suitable upgrades/extensions to meet the requirements of emergency services use. In particular, as other commentards have said, the ability for emergency services to continue to have comms at the expense of public access at times of high demand
Trouble is, they want all sorts of bells & whistles - PTT, group nets etc, all the stuff that Airwave currently does. But they want the cell network for data & video stuff too.
The Home Office never got the right people in to ask the very hard questions of EE. Or if they did they ignored them because they didn't like the answer.
ESN is based on an international standard which layers functionality over an existing 4G network. It only uses 4G as a data carrier & does not use much/any carrier specific functionality.
From a personal perspective, having worked on integrating ESN into a previous company's product, the main reason for the delay was the quality, or lack thereof, of the Motorola ESN implementation (Kodiak). It was supplied as SAAS ie something 'in the cloud', and was the most flaky, unreliable and inconsistent product I have *ever* used in 30 years of professional development. We were also provided (Android) handset software for testing/integration which was a bit more reliable but still beta quality.
Motorola's Kodiak is one implementation of ESN but there are others by Ericsson et al. Unfortunately, each implementation has its own quirks (think html rendering) such that changing implementations would require a huge amount of testing and bug fixing. Motorola walking away from the project effectively means everyone has to restart.
I also worked on ESN and can confirm Motorola's "Kodiak" push-to-talk product was absolutely terrible. Undocumented APIs, multiple individual SDKs, no documentation, flaky as hell, one shared dev/test cluster which constantly went down for days on end, support out of India who couldn't answer even basic questions. Total shitshow.
Another real world example is FirstNet in the US. Similar deal as EE's part of the ESN, subsidies (and in this case spectrum too) to beef up the network to provide guaranteed service to first responders and government agencies. Uses a separate core network to AT&T's public users, lots of attention paid to cybersecurity, all the rest of it.
I suppose the big difference is that agencies can choose how they want to use it, if they want to keep the critical voice comms on their existing radios then that's fine, but they could also integrate LTE PTT, they could just use it for data, whatever they want. Employees of eligible agencies can sign up for plans for their personal phones too. Seems very swish.
John - I was under the impression that the problems existed in what Motorola was supposed to be providing, rather than the underlying EE network? Moto had their contract cancelled while EE have not.
@Jonathon Green: You know, I can’t help thinking that you could buy an awful lot of prepaid SIMs and ruggedised generic mobile terminals for $11Bn and probably still have money left over...
It's thinking like that that enabled the adoption of this dreadful scheme in the first place; a complete lack of understanding of what is required and what will be required to make it work.
As @John Sager said elsewhere in this thread The Home Office never got the right people in to ask the very hard questions of EE. Or if they did they ignored them because they didn't like the answer and that seems to be as likely an explanation as any.
IMHO this ghastly project ought to be put out if its misery ASAP, even though what might replace it is a complete unknown.
The problem with commercial cell networks is they provide profitable coverage, whereas what an emergency services network needs is complete geographic coverage. The two are not the same.
Government has to intervene at the government - company level, it can't force geographic coverage provision via retail custom.
And of course, they have since cancelled every single part of HS2 that was required for the economic case.
Now, if everything goes perfectly then the best we can now hope for is that it turns part of Brum into a commuter village.
Most of the cost, none of the benefit. Classic Tory.
When will the UK government learn that single supplier arrangements for contracts of this size are never good.
Game theory and good old common sense would tell you as much. You need one supplier to keep the other(s) honest.
Contracts are sizeable enough to make that possible and risk spreading benefits will far outweigh any potential loss of scale economies.
The motivation for multiple vendors and suppliers is then FOMO rather than complacency. FOMO is very powerful...
What the world needs is good, reliable, and interoperable push-to-talk implementations. It is a few years since I was at all close to this but I don't think much progress has been made... mumble, mumble... kodiak...
Civil servants decided they couldn't afford the risks of interoperability problems (and the finger pointing that would result) so went with single supplier. Would have been a great idea if it had worked. But...
Oh, there's been something to show for it all right :
Motorola Executive compensation 2022
Gregory Q. Brown Chairman and Chief Executive Officer $21,016,481
John P. Molloy Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer $6,778,354
Jason J. Winkler Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer $5,963,996
And plenty of others....
Yeah, that's what you have to understand about how public projects work under a neoliberal government. It's not about good governance and planning or providing vital services. It's about looting as much of the taxpayer's money as much as possible and funneling it to your rich mates in exchange for future favours, if not simply lining your own pockets directly. Take a look at the PPE scandal of the last few years in the UK if you doubt. Eight and even nine-figure contracts being awarded without vetting to companies part owned by Conservative MPs whose total assets amounted to £100 and a brass plate on a door somewhere, and who were never held accountable when they delivered unusable trash at ten times the market rate.
That's small fry, the current government can waste far more far quicker if it sets its mind to it. Take the 37Bn on the test and trace spreadsheet. My only question is who in government trousered the ill gotten gains from this white elephant? Who is going to get a job handed to them when they are inevitably given their P45 next year?
e.mail this article to Labour party HQ with a subtitle of "Do your damn job and hold the government's feet in the fire, we could have built a brand new hospital and employed the staff with the money wasted on this"
Then again, its very likely that if labour lose the next election, some people on the labour benches will have a new job.... working sorry consulting for motorola.. alledgedly
e.mail this article to Labour party HQ with a subtitle of "Do your damn job and hold the government's feet in the fire...
I would agree with you but for the fact that there is nobody on the Opposition front bench with the technical knowledge to make a proper job of challenging the Home Office about all this.
The relevant Select Committee stands a much better chance of highlighting Home Office failings in the adoption of the as yet non - existence of the ESN.
Apparently the Home Office has had some Mickey Mouse murals painted over at an immigration centre. Supposedly this was because they weren't "age appropriate", but my guess is that ministers realised a selfie in front of them was just an accident waiting to happen.
We're supposed to be worried about Chinese infiltration these days. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out foreign spies are the only people in the UK Government who actually know what they are doing.
No, because a regular phone from BT Mobile or any other telco, they are designed for one person to talk to one other specific individual. That is not what happens most of the time in the emergency services. They need to maybe talk to the control room, or talk to everyone in a specific area, and they don't know in advance who is going to be in that area.
Badly defined scope, weak management, cost-overruns. Par for the course with Government procurement.
Why do we continue to tolerate such incompetence - and for that matter - why do public services? These are really not that hard to sort out. Define objective, write strategy to deliver those objectives. Go.
Blech.
There are reasons that cellular mobile comms was invented and we aren't all carrying walkie-talkies. Cellular is much, much, MUCH more efficient in how many users can be conducting simultaneous conversations (and using data comms) at the same time over a particular channel allocation.
It goes obsolete quickly so that new technologies (way beyond voice) can be provided over the same chunks of spectrum allocation.
That brings big advantages to modern emergency services, but also some significant disadvantages. Welcome to the modern world.
"big advantages to modern emergency services, but also some significant disadvantages. Welcome to the modern world."
With all due respect, I didn't see anything relating to "robustness" or "reliability" or "maintainability" or similar in your post. But then those words are a bit surplus to "modern" requirements, as I suspect you already know all too well.
[edit: do things like GSM-R offer any lessons]
Actually, "robustness" and "reliability" are probably pretty similar - failure modes are very different from analogue but I suspect they even out.
"maintainability" is different -- cellular is much more complex, so it won't be any use when centralised facilities are destroyed (wartime, for example), but that is not what the emergency services are really designed for. The benefits of data comms in real-life, day-to-day emergency services vastly outweigh the maintainability disadvantage.
"Cellular is much, much, MUCH more efficient in how many users can be conducting simultaneous conversations (and using data comms) at the same time over a particular channel allocation."
Perhaps in the same way as DAB is much more efficient at allowing more adverts to be delivered over the same bandwidth as the preceding technology?
But in general DAB seems to fail wrt coverage (especially in fringe areas) and fail abysmally wrt battery life. Probably others too. Shame ESN didn't see it coming.. Lessons will no doubt be learned.
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