Re: Single points of failure?
@Giovani Tapini
I agree too. 4G isn't currently anywhere near ubiquitous enough to be used as emergency comms. When you take into account coastal, mountainous and remote parts of the UK (highland and island etc) it's doubtful that 2 or 3G networks could cover everywhere either. A big chunk of the costs of the new system must presumably be about filling coverage holes in the existing cellular networks.
Broadly speaking, there are two sets of cellular networks in the UK - MBNL (EE and 3) and cornerstone (O2 and Vodafone). All the companies run their own masts and backhaul, but handsets can connect to the partner company's masts if they're in a dead spot for their own network. I'm not entirely opposed to the idea that the government subsidise this private infrastructure for the purposes of guaranteeing coverage of the last few % of the UK's territory, but I do think it's questionable to only grant this cash to EE for the MBNL network. Setting up the emergency services 4G network as an MVNO that could connect to any mast that's available might be contractually more difficult, but it would likely result in better overall coverage with less need to build extra masts.
With a bit of foresight from Ofcom (I know... VTOL bacon first) coverage requirements to support this could have been included as conditions in the 4G spectrum auctions. Maybe it's not too late to do something in the 5G auctions.
"They need to stand back from fancy technical standards and keep to the big picture which is high reliability voice and data with location/carrier independence as far as possible."
Had to quote this - I couldn't agree more. 4G radios nearly always seem to support fallback to 3G (possibly 2G as well), and 5G radios will almost certainly have similar backward compatibility. Fixing the network to 4G already seems silly now, but it'll look downright stupid when 5 or 6G networks are the norm for civilian comms.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
