Re: So once again the Home Offices proves itself
And does anyone believe that "Substantially the same" claim about what Motorola charged them for that 3 year extension?
Given that the initial high cost of providing TETRA / Airwave will have been to cover the high costs associated with site acquisition and construction, and those costs ought to have been amortised years ago there is an arguable case that any extension to the contract should be relatively modestly priced. (Some hope!!) At the same time Motorola must know full well that it has the Home Office over a barrel, with nowhere else to go.
Ultimately this whole sorry enterprise will provide another case study for collectors of botched procurements. I doubt if the supposed cost savings will ever materialise; EE (and I suspect Samsung) must be ratcheting up development costs that were not factored in at the time of the original bidding process, and they will want to recover those costs.
I strongly suspect that there have been no meaningful proof - of - concept trials yet; had there been their "success" would have been trumpeted for all to hear. When TETRA was adopted it was after trials conducted on Jersey; I suspect that the adoption of ESN was based on scribbled notes written by sales droids, and that those are no longer worth the paper they were scribbled on, and quite probably never were.
I also suspect that the serious slippage in the target date will also provide serious headaches for the user community, who are faced with the real prospect of having to replace existing equipment with "more of the same" when its useful lifetime might be very short.
The expression "not fit for purpose" is on my view vastly overworked, but I can see no other description applicable to the clowns in the Home Office who have committed the user community to a system that apparently cannot currently be shown to work and the taxpayer for a large bill with not much to show for it. A bit like the Nimrod Maritime Patrol aircraft programme if my memory is correct...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
