UK emergency services take DIY approach amid 12-year wait for comms upgrade
- Reference: 1682678409
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/04/28/uk_esn_alternatives/
- Source link:
Facing a 12-year delay with no delivery date in sight for the UK emergency services' voice and data network, users are being forced to look for a stopgap to upgrade the reliable but legacy Airwave system. Service leaders told MPs this week they were concerned that user processes and technology decisions could not be woven back into ESN if it ever arrived.
Speaking to the Public Accounts Committee, Ben Norman, deputy chief fire officer of Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service, said while ESN had been effectively paused, there was a risk that alternatives to the current Airwave system would become "embedded."
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"The fire and rescue services use [Airwave] as a data-based product, but in truth it is little more than text messages. So we have found alternatives and there's a real risk that people won't want to step away from those alternatives, or a real risk that those alternatives are so heavily embedded that it's difficult culturally to make that change [to ESN]," he said.
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Chris Lucas, senior user of NHS Ambulance Radio Programme, told the public spending watchdog that services were implementing data solutions based on LTE.
"We're increasingly using more LTE commercial services to backfill the gap where ESN isn't at the moment. And I think that's the challenge. We're getting used to using those services. We've currently mobilizing the vehicle hardware and LTE connections – originally designed for ESN – but we put in EE commercial SIMs. So that's happening now," he said.
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The cost of supporting Airwave technology combined with developing the ESN has been a staggering [5]£11 billion ($13.7 billion) over 10 years [PDF], according to the National Audit Office (NAO). The role of Motorola in both old and new systems attracted the interest of the Competition and Markets Authority owing to a potential conflict of interest on pricing and delivery. Together with the Home Office's negotiations with Motorola, this led the US technology supplier to walk away from its [6]£400 million ($498 million) contract for ESN.
[7]UK's Emergency Services Network unlikely to start operating until 2029
[8]£2B in UK taxpayer cash later, and still no Emergency Services Network
[9]UK regulator proposes price cap on Motorola as supplier of Airwave network
[10]UK police to spend tens of millions on legacy comms network kit
According to the NAO, the Home Office expected Motorola to be awarded £304 million ($379 million) for work on ESN by March 31, including money for software and systems that the emergency services will not use whenever ESN goes live, [11]which won't be before 2026 and may be as late as 2029 .
With Motorola gone from the critical push-to-talk and data solution provided by ESN's Lot 2 contract, the Home Office has been forced to reprocure the work and expects to appoint a new supplier in 2024, leading to further delays and uncertainty for service users.
"Just as progress was starting to be made, there's a whole piece of the programme missing," said Simon Ricketts of the Home Office's Independent Technical Assurance Panel.
Ricketts told MPs the UK government had gone too early with plans for a technology replacement in around 2012, owing to [12]trouble with the Airwave contract procured under the Private Finance Initiative.
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An international review by his team suggested services in other countries were now able to move ahead with mobile broadband technology for emergency services at a faster pace than the UK, he said, with France expected to have its network up and running in time for the Paris 2024 Olympics. ®
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[5] https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/progress-with-delivering-the-emergency-services-network.pdf
[6] https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:209642-2019:TEXT:EN:HTML
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/06/emergency_services_network_2029/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/09/esn_nao_report/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/17/cma_motorola_airwave/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/09/uk_police_legacy_airwave_bill/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/06/emergency_services_network_2029/
[12] https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/public-private-partnerships-airwave/
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZEvtoxDPgGhY8uqpv6mLSAAAABA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Too Big?
Public money well spent.
They paid £20k for the esn.co.uk domain name
Record incompetence
12 years and they're still not ready with ESN.
What on Earth is the government playing at? Why is it taking them so long to sort out what is effectively a private phone network, using nearly all existing masts, with push to talk capabilities!?
Re: Record incompetence
The government? Unfortunately the government seldom get involved unless embarrassing enough questions are asked in the house. You can argue that relevant ministers should be riding the relevent civil servants backs, but that's (unfortunately) not how it works.
No doubt the relevant civil servants in charge of this have changed roles once a year since this all started maybe these projects would actually work better if it wasn't for civil service musical chairs.
Re: Record incompetence
It's not a phone network - Airwave offers far more than just point to point communications.
The ESN should always have been a data only product to start, to work alongside TETRA for voice (and low bandwidth data).
Then you can add voice support over the data until you get to the point where you don't need AW any more.
Re: Record incompetence
It is a phone network - pedantry over minutiae is what gets governments into 12 year overrunning projects. It runs via the existing 4G transmitters. It is not Airwave or Tetra.
Hint : if you cannot readily agree on what the thing is, it seems pretty obvious that a bunch of civil servants are not going to be particularly efficient in defining what the upgrade should be.
Re: Record incompetence
@localzuk
Have a look and a listen to the government ministers, and ask no more.
Services in other countries were now able to move ahead ... faster
UK government's most likely response these days: "have we considered sabotage?".
Re: Services in other countries were now able to move ahead ... faster
always find it strange that we don't seem to inquire what other countries do, what do the Germans, French, Spanish et al do. Is it little Englander syndrome?
Re: Services in other countries were now able to move ahead ... faster
That's been the case as long as I can remember: the attitude among the Great And Good in the UK always seems to have been "We know what we're doing so we'll ignore what anybody else might know".
Take monetary decimalization:
- The Canadians went decimal first and the results weren't good, but Australia and NZ had observers there and noted the mistakes.
- Australia went next, avoided all the Canadian mistakes, but made a few of their own. NZ had observers there and noted a few new mistakes.
New Zealand went third, and had a largely trouble-free conversion to decimal currency.
UK? Didn't have any observers at any of the previous three monetary decimal conversions, but nonetheless not only repeated all the cock-ups made by the previous three, but invented a truckload more, causing such a mess that any further rationalization has been impossible like, for instance, the largely mishandled and never completed switch to metric weights and measures.
Re: Services in other countries were now able to move ahead ... faster
They did ask the Germans, but they thought that the Brits had decided against wanting their system when they said "nein, nein, nein!".
Reasons for delay?
Does anyone know if some of the hold-ups are due to inter-service rivalry or competing requests? The late Lewis Page of this parish wrote a book on defence procurement which included how the first of these was a big factor in project over-runs and bloat. Have the police tried to pull rank over the fire service, or do the brigade have genuine needs or "ooh! shiny!" want lists that would hinder the ambulance service?
Re: Reasons for delay?
Whilst each service have their own needs they aren't contradictory - it shouldn't be hard:
- Continue with AW and provide a data only ESN
- Prove that the data connection is good
- Enable voice over data (much harder than people give it credit for)
- Enable emergency location / fall detection / summon capabilities
- Prove the above
- Start to phase TETRA out of the least critical parts of the services initially
- Prove that the voice connection (both transmission and hardware) is sufficiently reliable
- Phase out TETRA everywhere you can, leaving the nice voice only, high reliability, long range, repeat capable TETRA voice network for the remote areas of the country - and maybe carry local TETRA cells in fire engines / ambulances to deal with not-spots in buildings etc (ESN backhaul, rather than the current TETRA repeater style)
Two systems cannot become one
A few people have suggested running Airwave and ESN (network + handsets) together and gradually transition over to ESN.
Unfortunately, two handsets for an emergency services worker is probably one too many. A combination handset would be prohibitively expensive and possibly difficult to implement from a user interface point of view ie how to switch seamlessly between Airwave & ESN functionality. There is also the question of battery life connecting to two networks.
Integration with emergency services control rooms would also require some effort as most are only setup for Airwave.
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.
ESN is based on an international standard which layers functionality over an existing 4G network. Motorola's Kodiak is one implementation 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.
Finally, ESN relies on 4G, so no 4G, no ESN. I believe Airwave has very good coverage but still has a lot of dead spots. Just think about your own mobile phone dead spots and wonder what an emergency services worker would do.
Re: Two systems cannot become one
There was always going to be a period of network interworking between the ESN network and Airwave, it'd be impossible to do a big bang switch, so it was always planned for.
Having worked on the control room side of things the main issues always seemed with Motorola and their implementation of Kodiak - so many changed specs, changes in operations and the like, and it always seemed to take far too long to get a response back.
The 4g network being used by ESN had been greatly improved by EE over the last few years - they were onto a winner, effectively getting paid by the government to improve their network coverage!
Re: Two systems cannot become one
> Finally, ESN relies on 4G, so no 4G, no ESN
That's good. By the time the ESN is ready to roll out, all the networks will be on standalone 5G anyway!
Too Big?
There's a common problem with public sector contracts and projects. It's not really that they are too big as such, it's that they are bigger than initially thought and too big for the people managing them.
This is typical of this type of project. Somebody came up with the idea and didn't spend enough time scoping the project. 12 years on and virtually no real progress? Thats the ultimate expression of project creep.
I've been involved in projects where decisions are taken during development that something previously considered in scope is now ruled out of scope (usually because it's too difficult), other things that were out of scope are now in scope (either because they should have been in scope all along, or because the organisation has changed during the project) and where there are continual arguments about what the scope actually is. The end result being that the project goes nowhere because people are still arguing about the scope after the planned finish date for the project has already passed.
By now somebody should have realised that it's almost pointless to continue. Cut your losses, kill the project and start again. Only this time scope it right in the first place. Sometimes when you've actually completed scoping the project you realise it's not even viable. That's fine. All you need to do is go back and redefine what the project is.