OK, it's fair to say UK's botched Emergency Services Network is an emergency now, right?

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has delivered another damning report on the UK Home Office's bungling attempts to procure a replacement communications network for the emergency services. The Emergency Services Network (ESN) is meant to provide a comprehensive comms network for blue-light services running on a 4G network to …

[Doctor Syntax]

But not all doom and gloom. Facial recognition is coming along nicely, just a slight problem with false positives.

[dogcatcher]

Coverage, what coverage ?

Maybe they might discover that the 4G network doesn't cover the whole of the country beyond the M25 ring.

[caffeine addict]

Re: Coverage, what coverage ?

damn you, dogcatcher. :)

[Flywheel]

Re: Coverage, what coverage ?

It's not London beyond the M25 ring, so there's not a problem.

Written from The Northern PowerPoorhouse.

[sal II]

Re: Coverage, what coverage ?

Not much better inside the M25 ring either and that's for outside.

Inside is a s**t show. WiFi calling is mitigating the issue at home, but when you are not home...

[caffeine addict]

Is now the right time to say "4G? We haven't even got decent 2.5G!" ?

Bitching about the lack of decent cell coverage is a real first world problem, but when the emergency services are relying on it doesn't it have to have real coverage? I live in a Cambridgeshire town that (until recently) had a world renowned hospital in the middle of it. But no cell coverage on any network from 2G upwards.

[Flywheel]

Re: Is now the right time to say "4G? We haven't even got decent 2.5G!" ?

Dunno about you folks, but since EE switched on 5G my 4G signal has dropped to 50% WTF!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Is now the right time to say "4G? We haven't even got decent 2.5G!" ?

I have an ancient phone, 3G only. And in the last year my 3G signal on EE has more or less vanished into oblivion, even in places that used to have a good signal. Coincidence?

[john.jones.name]

maybe maybe just invest in a new mobile phone...

everyone complaining about their coverage (even in Papworth) is pretty silly

the old GSM phones power requirements where poor and the battery life terrible, get a decent LTE endpoint and you wont those problems... just others...

Yes the commercial providers provision less bandwidth to old networks now since everyone wants more bandwidth on LTE / 3G

Current Emergency Services radio equipment are terrible for long distance. Plenty of evidence of that.

the solution is to get manufacturers to do LTE Device to Device (D2D) so that when your in a hole you can talk to the person 40 meters away from you...

since finland are going to be shifting to LTE for emergency network from Tetra it might be worth finding out what they are doing :

https://www.erillisverkot.fi/en

the sooner we all get Peer to Peer message passing on LTE/5G networks the better

[JimboSmith]

Re: Is now the right time to say "4G? We haven't even got decent 2.5G!" ?

I've got a friend who lives out towards Bath and still doesn't have mobile coverage at home. Admittedly she and a few others houses are in a valley but.......you have to go a ways to find any coverage nearby. Reliant therefore on her landline and broadband for communication. Somebody in the village at least 10 years called the police about a rave/party being set up in a nearby field. The boys and girls in blue turned up and decided they needed extra officers. They asked to use the homeowners phone as they got nothing on their radios. One of them then walked up the hill where there was an Airwave/Tetra signal so that they could direct the others to the site. Apparently one of the police said he was grateful they didn't have to rely on mobiles to communicate.

[wyatt]

The Home Office promise that users can continue using Airwave until UKESN is as good as it is but have only negotiated the extension of Airwave until 2022. I hope that they've started discussing this further and arranged a cost as so far this hasn't gone well for them and negotiating when under pressure tends to on favour the supplier.

As also mentioned in the comments, so many locations don't have a 4G signal still, I wonder if they have an Airwave signal as there are still dead spots in it's coverage.

[Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese]

IIRC correctly, the coverage requirement for Airwave was based on availability around major roads, rather than other parts of the land mass....hence there are dead spots in its coverage.

Which is a bit s**t, whichever way you look at it

[Anonymous Coward]

AW cover is better landmass coverage than 4G has population coverage...

It also has the ability for a radio to act as a relay in the event that you need coverage into a valley - just put a vehicle at the top of the hill... 4G can't do that

[Pascal Monett]

"a 'pretty high' degree of confidence"

I'm quite sure the Home Office always has a pretty high degree of confidence, even when everything is failing and nothing is working.

The amount of confidence the Home Office has appears to be inversely proportional to the degree of functionality of the project.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong in so many ways....

Is it not about time this whole project was scrapped, and a new start made?

Mobile phone technologies have a life of around 20 years, as do emergency network infrastructure. Problem is, by the time this is working and rolled out, 4G will be at least half-way through it's life cycle. It will then be time to scrap the ESN and replace it with whatever comes next.

Handsets for this need to be fairly specilist and ruggedised - IPx, Eex rated, etc.

Every police force or other service has different requirements. Coverage and capacity for a densely packed urban area (london, manchester) is completely different from sheep shearing country. Police and fire services used to have their own specialist radio engineering teams who knew their patch and requirements. I can't believe that a company, ultimately controlled by bean counters in BT could come anywhere close.

As everyone on this forum knows mobile coverage is nowhere near as good as the providers claim it is, so god help us all when the services start using EE. Couple of weeks ago I spent a weekend in a hospital in a major city with an elderly relative. Trying to contact other family members was almost impossible unless you stood outside in the car park. Between us we had Vodafone, EE and 3. 2G, 3G and 4G and not one of them could give a reliable signal in at least three different wards/treatment centres, etc. as we were moved around. Around A+E and acute wards were all manner of ambulance, police and the like, frequently calling in on their tetra radios.

The UHF (400Mhz) tetra network had coverage limitations compared to earlier VHF networks. I dread to think how 2-3Ghz will fare under pressure. I know a couple of dockyard police, and when they had an onsite VHF system it used to cover quite well into ships, etc. Once they moved to Tetra and a mast/cell somewhere else in town, there was bugger all coverage once you stepped inside a ship.

Someone needs to make a brave decision, call the salesmans ability into question, abandon it, and come up with a new idea and invest in it properly.

[irrelevant]

Re: Wrong in so many ways....

Seconded. I spent much of the last week in and around a couple of hospitals. In the first, brand new building, the paramedics couldn't get a signal from inside A&E on their radio. In the other, central Manchester, no 4G and barely usable 3G. Even the wifi was borked.

[wyatt]

Re: Wrong in so many ways....

Yes. The project is based on achieving MCVOICE (mission critical voice) via VoLTE. The 3/4/5/etc G part of it isn't that important, just that there is a network available that can support it. Because the standards for MCVOICE hadn't been agreed on, there was no standard to work to and therefore the functionallity hasn't/hadn't been implemented.

The UK is now in the position that it has committed to a system which does not yet fully exist outside of a lab (compared with Airwave). Other countries have invested in their Tetra systems for MCVOICE leaving data running over the mobile phone networks as they are, something we probably wish we had done. Vodaphone have changed the Airwave backhaul from TDM to cater for the extension but this won't remain up for ever/come without a cost.

It is all quite interesting, but then you consider that lives depend on ESN working correctly and it's a bit scary how bad a job is being done.

[NotBob]

Re: Wrong in so many ways....

Across the pond, the most functional systems for rural areas still use radio. Multiple vendors available, dead simple to figure out, no lock-in. Just some frequency allocated so that it's not used by anyone else. Local dispatch centers make sure everyone is within reasonable range, and ring-downs cover when the wrong center picks up. Mostly works when the phone lines are down, even, although it makes it harder for folks to call emergency numbers. This can be used in urban areas with minimal issues, as well.

Why a country would feel the need to do all this over cellular or via one vendor, I cannot understand.

[Will Godfrey]

Re: Wrong in so many ways....

Brown paper envelopes is the answer.

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Re: Wrong in so many ways....

Brown paper envelopes is the answer

And (if my experience is anything to go by) the people procuring the system don't have any experience of what is required and (even worse) don't actually talk to the end-users to see what they need and their current experience.

So you end up with a system that (on paper) looks really good and has all the right buzzwords in it but is, for all practical purposes, utterly useless.

[batfink]

An "extra" £3.1Bn?

So, in order to save £200m per year, the budget for this has blown out by £3.1Bn. So, a bit over 15 years' worth of savings. Extra. Never mind what the original budget was.

Can someone please remind me of the Business Case again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: An "extra" £3.1Bn?

"Can someone please remind me of the Business Case again?"

Are you referring to the "if mobile coverage fails to reach the levels we hope for, we could end up paying for TWO expensive networks rather than one. If this looks unlikely to happen, we will add requirements to create new functionality that is not currently met to ensure project failure" clause?

[Commswonk]

Epic Fail?

From the article: On current evidence it seems inevitable that there will be further delays and cost increases

In any sensible world the penalty clauses within the contract would have been invoked by now, with EE having to pay the continuing costs of keeping Airwave running.

However, in the Alice - in - Wonderland world of the Home Office it seems more than likely that no - one thought to have any penalty clauses, or if they did EE refused to play if a penalty clause or two was included. With no mention of them anywhere in this long - running blunderfest I assume that there simply aren't any, in which case the present situation was almost inevitable.

Oh for the halcyon days when the Home Office had technically competent personnel in DTels; I cannot help but feel that if that department still existed "we" might not be in the mess we are.

Disclaimer: No; I didn't work for DTels.

[Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese]

Re: Epic Fail?

In any sensible world the penalty clauses within the contract would have been invoked by now, with EE having to pay the continuing costs of keeping Airwave running.

EE are only providing the physical network infrastructure - there are a couple of other companies involved. One of these is Motorola. Motorola are also responsible, separately, for Airwave. So...get Moto to stump up a load of cash to pay to Moto to keep Airwave alive.

Ahh....Government procurement

[Commswonk]

Re: Epic Fail?

Ahh....Government procurement

Quite so...

I'm not sure if HMG has a contract with Motorola to provide ESN network infrastructure, or if that contract is with EE. With one (primary) contractor that has to provide everything via separate contracts making a penalty clause work should be fairly easy. If all the contracts are separate then all the contractors finish up squabbling amongst themselves blaming one another while the Principal (in this case the Home Office) has to more or less stand on the touch - line waiting for an outcome.

I also noted that nothing has been done yet to award a contract for helicopter radio systems. No great surprise there... However, I find myself worrying that I have seen no mention of providing ESN radio equipment for "marine assets". There is a significant number of Police launches and RIBs around the country, and getting functional and reliable communications into them is a major challenge, albeit for reasons very different to those affecting airborne radio systems.

That said I don't know why I am "worrying"; being retired from the game I have no involvement beyond eating the popcorn.

[Jon 37]

Re: Epic Fail?

They decided to go with separate contracts for everything. One contract for the network, one for handsets, one for "project management", etc. That way, they get to be locked into two essential monopoly suppliers rather than just one. And no-one is responsible when the bits don't work together.

[caffeine addict]

Re: Epic Fail?

In any sensible world the penalty clauses within the contract would have been invoked by now, with EE having to pay the continuing costs of keeping Airwave running.

This assumes that the HO, Police, Fire and Ambulance lot haven't all been regularly moving the goalpost. History says this won't have been the case.

[Rich 2]

Simple answer

What the Home Office needs to do is pass the whole thing on to someone who never f*cks up, is never late, never over budget, always delivers, and doesn't pay bribes to some despot government in the desert.

Mmmmm.... like BAe!

I'm sure there are several other candidates :-) ....Serco?

[alvinamartino]

Re: Simple answer

Sometime to set the professional enviement in home is bit dificult

[macjules]

Home Office lacks plan, skills, budget control or achievable deadlines

Which project does this belong to again? I am pretty sure that applies to just about every HO project since John Peel had an idea about a permanent police force.

[Commswonk]

Re: Home Office lacks plan, skills, budget control or achievable deadlines

I am pretty sure that applies to just about every HO project since John Peel had an idea about a permanent police force.

You mean Robert Peel.

[Anonymous Coward]

Robert Peel vs John Peel.

Robert Peel. That's why we call them bobbies.

If it had been John Peel, they would be called johnnies......

But at least we would have teenage kicks all through the night :o)

[BebopWeBop]

Re: Robert Peel vs John Peel.

Well John Peel would be using pony express for comms

[adam 40]

Re: Robert Peel vs John Peel.

Nah I think he would have had the Police sending their messages in a bottle....

[macjules]

Re: Home Office lacks plan, skills, budget control or achievable deadlines

My bad, thinking too much of red coats and hunting with dogs.

[Starace]

Won't work can't work

Let's take a wild guess that they started off with a shopping list of vague requirements and a naive understanding of what was possible.

What's certain is that anyone with a brain wouldn't try to build an emergency sevice comms system on top of a 4G (or any other) phone network. You build it with technology that is actually suited to the problem.

If you want fancy smartphone features *and* a decent rugged comms system then you do what everyone already does; buy two handsets and take advantage of normal cheap phones for that side of things.

The priority now should be to rebid rather than throwing more money into a bottomless hole.

[Jon 37]

Re: Won't work can't work

Or do what Huawei did: produce a handset that has both Tetra and 2G/3G/4G radios, so you get the better coverage and voice features of the existing Tetra system with the higher data speed of 2G/3G/4G. But we couldn't have that because it's Huawei.

[adam 40]

Re: Won't work can't work

It would be a piece of piss to bung an LTE module into an Airwave handset... job done!

[Adair]

I would go for...

Legally requiring all mobile service providers to supply bandwidth to the Emergency Services, plus a legal requirement to have complete coverage by a certain date, to a certain standard, along with a requirement to share masts (if they don't already).

Basically to make to clear that if they want to make money from the good peasants of Britain they need to pitch in and help make things work properly for the benefit of all, and that includes making themselves look good.

Quid pro quo - capitalism needs more of it. ;-)

[Commswonk]

Re: I would go for...

Legally requiring all mobile service providers to supply bandwidth to the Emergency Services...

Trouble is it's not just bandwidth that's required, it's functionality within that bandwidth. The operating system (i.e. software) for mobile phones and that for ESN are not the same. On top of bandwidth it would require all the MNOs to have ESN - compatible software running in the background.

It would be interesting to know how well cell handovers would work if it involved network operator handover as well.

[SPiT]

As good as Airwave

For those of you wondering what as good as Airwave means, the coverage definition for Airwave amounts to effective voice communications from a vehicle standard radio (ie better than a handheld aerial) in 99% of all locations within 100m of a public road in the England, Wales and Scotland (no Northern Ireland). This includes coverage on remote islands that have no mobile phone service (or didn't have at the time). Typical mobile phone coverage definition is based on the percentage of the UK population that can achieve a voice call within 100m of where they live OR, the other alternative, a 100m square is defined as in coverage if there is a location within that square where you can make a voice call. The two are dramatically different.

This one phrase "agree a set of detailed criteria under which ESN will be judged against Airwave and decide when those criteria are properly met" could wreck the entire project as it will be near impossible to get the users, the ESN project team and EE to agree since the actual ESN contract with EE doesn't require that the Airwave standard is met.

I'm fully expecting a future where ESN has been deployed and is in use for data but the parties cannot agree that it has acceptable voice coverage so we end up with what is, financially, the absolute worst case of paying for both. Please note, this was entirely predictable from the very beginning of the project so if that is where we end up then the top level decision makers are fully responsible but will, of course, never be held to account.

[Commswonk]

Re: As good as Airwave

@ SPiT: I sincerely hope that you are wrong, but equally strongly suspect that you aren't.

[Pete4000uk]

Mixed mode

You can get DMR push to talk radios with 4G connectivity today.

The best of both worlds, but maybe not fancy enough.

[Will Godfrey]

It IS possible at a cost

Some years back a remote relative of mine (an electrical engineer in London of some seniority) was 'interviewed' by some un-named individuals, and handed a radio unit with instructions that he was to keep it with him at all times - even in the toilet - for the duration of an event he couldn't tell us about.

When he asked about signal conditions he was told that the unit would work anywhere in the country. Our man was not easily convinced, so he asked about if he was in a basement or tunnel. He was then informed that they couldn't imagine that he would want to enter any public tunnels in the UK where the radio wouldn't work, and was politely advised that they doubted a person in his position would need to enter a basement.

We never did find out what the 'event' was :(

[NeilPost]

Airwave was shit too

Short memories, or tossed staff. Airwave delivery was a cluster-Fuck too in it’s BT-less Cellnet/O2 days.