Re: Unheard of
An AC wrote: this is not 1950s America!
With two "centers" and one "prioritization" in the article someone clearly thinks that it is at least America, if not necessarily the 1950s.
Grrr...
1706 posts • joined 3 Sep 2015
...so whats wrong with what they're using at present?
I will take that to mean "what's wrong with TETRA / Airwave".
The data capability of TETRA is rather less than modest, and this was seen as a potential problem 16 years ago when I retired from "emergency communications". How much of a limitation it has been in practice is something on which others may be able to comment.
On paper TETRA can handle video but again the capability is modest and bandwidth hungry; quite how necessary video really is I'm not sure. Even static images can be a problem; again there is a bandwidth requirement to send them. The original TETRA equipment had no camera capability (and that might still be the case) but the screens on the mobile terminals (mobile here including hand - portable) were so small as to make viewing a still picture of a known suspect (etc) sent out by a Control Room close to pointless.
TETRA was a quantum leap in police (etc) communications capability, but that did not stop the users (or at least their high - level representatives) from proclaiming its shortcomings as show - stoppers.
Oh how I wish I'd have brought shares in Motorola, they're lapping it up!
Quite. It's hardly Motorola's fault if there is not really a competitive market in TETRA equipment and networks.
The Home Office is likely to find the same in trying to find 3 potential suppliers of mobile terminals. IIRC many years ago (when TETRA was very new) there were 4 then; Motorola (surprise!) Cleartone (for vehicle equipment only) Sepura and Nokia. Again IIRC Nokia soon dropped out leaving (by simple arithmetic) just 3. Then Cleartone decided to do likewise and their (singular) product (the CM5000 if memory serves) was taken over by... let me think... Motorola.
With Sepura now being owned by Hytera it might no longer be acceptable for secure and sensitive communications to have overlords in the Middle Kingdom; if it has fallen out of favour that leaves just 1; Motorola.
Not Motorola's fault; just a function of the way the cookie crumbles.
This latest Home Office plan (if it can be said to be a plan) is IMHO unlikely to achieve the intended result.
@ David 132: One has to hope that the Russian kleptocracy puts aside just enough of the Russian oil to immolate Putin in the grounds of the Reichstag Kremlin.
That's all well and good but it is very far from certain that his replacement would be any warmer towards adjacent democracies than Putin is. If Putin is toppled it is more than likely that it will not be for attacking Ukraine but for failing to succeed.
RRH Portreath in Cornwall?
Good point!
Dear Cornwall County Council,
Please nicely can we have our runway at St Mawgan back?
Love,
The RAF.
Joking aside I would have thought that St Mawgan would be a good location for Typhoons to be based; a much shorter route for patrolling around Ireland than anywhere else on the UK mainland.
Aldergrove would be even better, although that might be too busy with civil air traffic for the Quick Reaction Alert role. That said, a few minutes delay in getting off the ground would be less than waiting for a couple of aircraft to fly across from Cornwall or wherever, and would give a much greater loitering time over the Atlantic.
Couple of sources for you.
Many thanks for posting those; very informative indeed.
Perhaps a previous (UK) government was a bit too quick to cancel some of the planned Typhoon deliveries... along with stopping pilot training with some only just short of qualifying.
Ah well; that's politicians for you.
Ireland have already asked the RAF to patrol Irish airscpace for them. ... They also don't have primary radar, so when the Russians fly military aircraft around their coastline with their transponders off, it's a serious danger to commercial aviation. So the RAF have agreed to intercept the Russians doing that, as we'd probably being doing anyway - just we can use Irish airspace to make it easier.
Have you got a source for that; I'm not actually doubting you but I'd like to see it somewhere else!
Assuming it to be correct, it might be something of a headache for the RAF; AFAIK there is no Air Defence Radar providing coverage to the west of the UK south of RRH Benbecula, and all the airfields from which Air Interceptors (i.e. Typhoons) operate are on the eastern side of the UK, unless of course they have been quietly basing aircraft at RNAS Prestwick (HMS Gannet) or RAF Valley in North Wales, or even the rather underused airport at Blackpool, which was once RAF Squires Gate.
...but how many strokes or MIs do you expect in the same household?
I hope I don't have to reply on you for any first aid. I cannot for the life of me imagine what good a defibrillator will do for a casualty who has suffered a stroke. Please do tell...
See earlier posts about MIs.
How was it an obvious MI?
In a sense it doesn't matter. A defibrillator will not administer a shock to a heart that is generating a normal pulse; neither will it give a shock if it cannot detect a "shockable rhythm" in the casualty.
When fibrillating the heart muscles stop working with their correct rhythm and sequence leaving a residual rather chaotic series of small ineffective "trembles" and if the defibrillator cannot detect the basis of a working rhythm then it will advise that chest compressions should be continued in the hope that the external pumping will restore enough of a normal rhythm for a shock to be worthwhile.
The Ambulance arrived 18 minutes later, the defibrillator, over an hour later - no-one knew the code to get into the storage box!
Isn't that something that the 999 operator is supposed to give you?
Yes, but... Actually the Ambulance Dispatcher, not the "999 operator", but this only works when the 999 call is made from beside the defibrillator enclosure, so that the caller can give the correct (previously agreed) description of the location, which IIRC is also displayed. Without that the dispatcher has no idea which code to give the caller.
Unison southeast regional organiser Joshua Cooper told the BBC: "Ambulance and control room staff are working tirelessly to respond to every emergency call they receive and doing all they can to keep patients safe. Lengthy delays are causing much distress to NHS staff. Staff are already at breaking point after months of 'winter-style' pressures." (My bold)
While I don't doubt that Unison's statement is true, I cannot help but feel that it was rather ill considered; I suspect that the stress felt by people awaiting ambulance attendance and their families was somewhat greater.
In the BBC, up to at least the 1980s, we used butterfly fuses...
Ah the nostalgia... those fuses were used on anything operating from the - 50 Volt Station Battery...
Too many years ago I worked in the (then) BH Ext in London, more or less overlooking Duchess Street. What I was doing at the time is long forgotten but on one occasion I was working on something on a temporary feed from one of those fuse panels, and in simple terms things weren't performing as they should.
Switch off; check supply voltage; nothing wrong there. Switch on again; problem still present. Check voltage with equipment connected... aha! That's a bit low.
Some comedian (longer in the tooth than I was) has replaced the fusible link with a resistor, rendering the "fuse" somewhat useless.
For the uninitiated the fuse wire (or resistor, as the case may be) was actually invisible as the butterfly's wings concealed it when the wire (or resistor) was soldered in.
Oh happy, innocent days... mostly anyway.
Could installation of a robust mobile be cost-effective?
Hardly; if a phone box is too little used to be worth retaining when connected by line how would it become worth retaining if converted to a "robust mobile"?
Some of the boxes that are likely to be decommissioned haven't been used at all in the last 12 or even 24 months.
And before anyone asks I do not and never have worked for BT.
It would be interesting to see the letter that "97 per cent of parents, carers and children had consented to the use of facial scanning".
Indeed it would, and the concept of consent is meaningless if that consent is not properly informed. IANAL but given that a "child" cannot sign a contract (for example) I am far from convinced that a child can consent to the use of a photograph without being fully aware of the attendant risks. Having said that I am equally unconvinced that a parent would have sufficient knowledge or be provided with enough other information for their consent to be any more "informed" than their child's agreement.
Given the fact that some people - often (I understand) children - seem to be perfectly happy to post wholly inappropriate photographs of themselves to anyone who asks, it would seem to be clear that on balance the wider population has simply no idea of the risks associated with "personal information" being given away for less than convincing reasons.
Golden Rule of Data: Where data exists there will be attempts to misappropriate it and once that has happened there is simply no knowing how, when, where or for what reason it will be misused. But it almost certainly will be.
Offering price reductions without a corresponding reduction in scope is the same as saying you were overpriced to begin with.
Well yes... perhaps; it all depends on the starting point. When TETRA / Airwave rolled out there will have been a significant part of the cost allocated to amortising the costs of site acquisition and mast / building construction. It seems unlikely that the payments allocated to paying off those costs would be based on a assumption that the contract would be extended at all, never mind for as long as it has been so far.
I don't know for sure either way, but Motorola should have been able to reduce the annual charges paid by the Taxpayer because all the initial expenditure had been covered, with "just" maintenance costs chargeable thereafter.
On the face of it Motorola ought to be been able to offer a reduction some years ago, even allowing for the fact that some of the electronics might have to be replaced, but I strongly suspect that they didn't.
Would the "corporate you" if you thought you could get away with it?
For those who don't know what the 6 P's are "Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance". Something that those who promoted Brexit seem to have completely ignored/forgotten.
Um... IIRC (and it is if) there were no cries of "we'll finish up with a shortage of HGV drivers if we leave" from the pro - Remain camp.
One possible reason for this might be that the current shortage has got something between little and bugger all to do with leaving the EU...
there's still a staggering number of small businesses in the UK who are still using legacy lines
And what about residential subscribers, the (vast?) majority of whom will have no idea what is coming down the line? AFAIK BT has not started to generate any widespread publicity to advise domestic customers of the changes that are ahead.
I hope I am wrong but it could all get very messy when BT actually set about converting the country, presumeably exchange area by exchange area. I would expect most customers will require a measure of direct support from BT / Openreach personnel; do they have sufficient boots on the ground to provide a prompt and effective support service to those who need it?
Have they carried out a trial in any area to find out exactly what is likely to be required when the rollout proper gets going? Or - heaven help us - has the determination of the degree of support required been based on a purely desk - top exercise?
demonwarcat wrote: BT's Smarthub 2 has a POTS socket. Interesting... back in 2005 when we dragged Commswonk Towers into the 21st century our (ADSL) hub had a POTS socket; when we migrated to VDSL the replacement hub didn't. When I replaced the hub with a Smarthub (in the hope of improving wifi coverage... successfully) it came without a POTS socket either, which doesn't look much like future - proofing it.
I am of the opinion that everything could go terribly wrong terribly quickly. 2025 is not that far off, considering the total number of subscribers to be managed.
As stated above... I hope I am wrong.
Maybe I am missing something but for most users having something at the 50Mb to 70Mb that FTTC delivers is surely enough.
Careful; in some places opinions like that are seen as heresy. Somebody somewhere will be heating up the tar and collecting feathers...
FWIW I agree with you...
So, the desire for finding the elusive "efficiencies" through the magic of outsourcing might be tempting to some.
I would like the opportunity to ask each and every person who is hoping for "efficiency savings" from an outsourcing (or any other) proposal What is your intended method of determining efficiencies, be they relative or absolute?
Being able to have a problem solved within 10 minutes is clearly more efficient than having it take all day. Being able to solve the same problem for £1 is clearly more efficient than a solution that costs £100. What you are highly unlikely to achieve is a solution costing £1 that only takes 10 minutes to apply. And yet time after time managers convince themselves that the latter is possible, and doubtless potential bidders will whisper all sorts of assurances about how they can actually do it.
Then - via some mysterious process - any penalty clause in the draft contract will somehow not appear in the signed version.
...and any time you add the word technology in place, it must be good - right
Has anyone else noticed how television advertisements simply have to have the word "technology" in them now? Even some brand of shampoo has some sort of "technology" as part of its formulation.
It makes my bullshit - detecting technology (a soggy mass of cells located between my ears) go into overdrive, followed by the sound of grinding teeth...
</rant>
...getting any sort of radio to work in those tunnels is an engineering nightmare.
IMO that is an overstatement; leaky feeders have been used to provide underground / tunnel radio communications for years; the engineering isn't really a nightmare, but the associated costs most assuredly are, not least because the area (volume?) that an individual cell can cover is quite modest in comparison with that covered by a cell with a tower - mounted aerial.
My fucking car's heating controls are touch screen (2014 Insignia), I do not understand how anyone thought it was a good idea...
Mine (also an Insignia) is 2017 and the situation is no better; probably worse if the truth be told. There are simply too many things that cannot be done without diverting one's concentration away from where it's supposed to be to somewhere else completely. Even changing the fan speed via the buttons in front of the gear change requires a diversion away from where one is supposed to be looking.
An open invitation to have an accident IMHO...
And don't get me started on the cost of repairs if (when?) anything goes wrong; I became aware (painfully) of this syndrome 2 cars ago; even a diagnosis costs in excess of £70.
Mrs Commswonk has berated me several times for buying cars with this problem; it was, of course, a different story when her Toyota Aygo required a "diagnosis" at about the same price. Ditto the actual "fix".
I got a bit of malicious satisfaction from that. :)
Ah yes; schadenfreude
Cummings painted an alarming picture of how a combination of groupthink and poor data led the UK authorities to stick with a response to the spread of the virus, characterised by a flawed plan to acquire herd immunity.
From what I have heard today I cannot recall hearing the names Whitty or Vallance being mentioned.
Where were they while all this was going on? Were they providing input to government or not? Was it clear and unambiguous, and if so what was it, or was it so dressed up in Civil Service wooliness that what they were saying was wholly unclear?
It just seems odd that while various politicians have been identified from what Cummings has said the "scientific community" might well have not been in the room... ever.
What I noticed in this photograph was the big red button on the panel... and the proximity that Mr Bean was to it
Fear not; from the photo it appears as though his hands have been tied behind his back to discourage their being placed anywhere they shouldn't be.
And I mean anywhere...
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