The end of Airwave and the truth about TETRA and LTE for UK emergency services (Act 1)
A blog about the UK Emergency Services Network in 3 parts.
Very few members of the public have heard of TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), the digital, critical communications standard used by several million public service & business users around the world – in over 130 countries - for their essential communications. For example, TETRA is the solution currently being used by all the emergency services in the United Kingdom.
During the early 2000s, a separate, resilient dedicated nationwide TETRA network was built across the United Kingdom, covering over 99% of the UK land-mass allowing instant, secure, private communications to authorised users during day-to-day operations; exceptional high-profile natural and man-made events such as floods, storms and the July 7th London bombings; providing extra capacity during Live Aid, Premier League football matches, the London Olympics and Royal Weddings; working away in the background 24/7/365 to keep us all safe, even when commercial solutions collapse under the strain or the lights go out.
TETRA is a highly efficient technology with advanced features such as mission-critical voice; all-inclusive group calls and direct device-to-device calls when outside network range, that are simply not available over commercial networks today optimised for data, infotainment or best-effort voice. No communications network is perfect and no communications network can be everything to everyone; but TETRA does what it does very well, providing a unique service to emergency services that is trusted & proven - and no other technology will be able to replace it anytime soon.
Most European governments sensibly decided that emergency communications is an essential public service that needs to be owned by the State in order to protect enormous social value and keep control over hidden costs and necessary upgrades. Once Governments have assigned spectrum for emergency services use and capital investment for a private network to be built, the actual costs of running the network can be reduced under public ownership because the profit motive is taken out of the contract and an elected parliament is held accountable. Increased volumes of TETRA equipment sales have also brought the price of radio terminals down to much lower levels over the years and older analogue networks have been switched off. IP-based TETRA networks can also be integrated with other ICT networks through control room solutions to give government and public safety officials increased situational awareness when things go wrong.
However, back in the 1990s, the UK Government was keen to experiment with a different business model. The privatisation of all aspects of public service and public life was already well underway, so a long-term contract was awarded to a private BT-led consortium creating a new entity, BT Airwave, to provide a guaranteed service first to all UK police forces, and then to the Ambulance & Fire Services as well as a number of other authorised organisations.
The UK Government seemed to be quite happy not to own or operate the network; it had a piece of paper – a signed contract – similar to those also available to electricity & gas companies, railways, national lottery, NHS foundation trusts etc., stipulating the prices to be charged and the regulatory regime that could step in under exceptional circumstances. Key management decisions and levels of investment in essential public services were now dependent on global capital market conditions, and the need to generate generous, guaranteed rates of return for private investors. Although this process was started by Conservative governments back in the 1980s, new Labour did nothing to reverse the process when it came to power in 1997 and in fact, the Airwave contract was signed in 2000 during the first Blair government.
BT sold their mobile operations, O2, including Airwave, to Spain’s Telefonica. Telefonica wished to focus more on its commercial activities so it, in turn, - with Government approval - sold Airwave on to an Australian private investment group, Macquarie, in 2007, as part of Macquarie’s European Investment Fund II. The UK public – and probably the majority of police officers, ambulance drivers, paramedics and fire officials - were totally oblivious to the fact that the entire UK emergency services communications network was now in the hands of a private investment fund that also had controlling stakes in Thames Water and National Car Parks. But times were good and very few people within government understood anything about TETRA and communications technology in general, so what could possibly go wrong?
Ironically, because TETRA works so well when it is needed, nobody notices it. This is the paradox of social value and what makes up a truly vibrant, healthy, secure society. Only when societies and governments face an existential crisis similar to that faced by Europe during the 2010s and 2020s, do we understand and appreciate the true, deeper, more human values that underpin our democracies and economies that cannot be measured in billions of euros, added up on a spreadsheet or solved by a sophisticated computer algorithm.
Only when the TETRA network is gone and the first major incident brings down its commercial replacement – as it necessarily will - will politicians and the public understand the folly of what has happened, but by then it will be too late and we will have to muddle on, as we British always do, and then spend hundreds of millions of pounds clearing up the mess, holding public inquiries, apportioning blame, wondering what went wrong and why nobody warned us. History repeating itself, repeating itself…
While giving evidence in front of the Public Accounts Committee in October 2014, the UK Government’s chief technology officer, Liam Maxwell, admitted that the government is paying £450 million a year to Airwave for a service that could be reduced to £70 million if replaced by a similar service with more modern technology. Unfortunately, this statement is totally inaccurate, because no modern technology – i.e. 4G LTE – is currently able to provide “a similar service”. No technology has yet been developed anywhere in the world that can replicate the full functionality of the TETRA network currently keeping us safe. The Government has always refused to accept that technology is not the problem here: it is not a case of TETRA being old and slow and LTE being new and fast. The original business model was flawed, and now the current government is trying to correct the original situation with a business model that is as flawed as the original one and will leave a poisoned chalice to the incoming administration.
Once again, European Governments are sensibly refreshing and upgrading their existing TETRA networks for another 10 years, at a fraction of the cost of the Airwave contract, because TETRA is now a mature, tried and tested technology with falling prices for hardware, software and valuable voice & data applications optimised for use by emergency services. Where high-speed data services are required such as video, building maps, ECG scans etc., the TETRA operators are signing MVNO agreements with commercial operators to be able to integrate 3G/4G service capability into their existing platforms and control rooms. All very sensible, logical; particularly in the current environment of heightened security where the availability of TETRA communications is a matter of life or death.
Public safety LTE standards are currently in the early stages of development within standards bodies such as 3GPP. Significant progress should hopefully be made by the recently convened SA6 group over the coming 12-18 months. The public safety & critical communications community is also lobbying for access to prime spectrum in the soon-to-be-vacated, globally-available 700 MHz band at the upcoming World Radiocommunication Conference 2015 (WRC-15) to be held in Geneva in November.
However, TETRA is still seen as the only serious option for mission-critical voice services by industry experts for many years to come, although it is recognised that commercial standards such as LTE and future 5G will be required to provide high-speed data and should be able to be included in the critical communications mix when real-world solutions are commercially available by 2020.
The UK coalition government came to power in 2010 with the clear intention of reducing government spending and boosting private sector investment. The Home Office and Cabinet Office quickly identified the Airwave contract as a problem area requiring a smart solution. A group of economists and experts sympathetic to commercial operators were convened and ESMCP (Emergency Services Mobile Communications Project) was born. The TETRA network would continue to operate until existing contracts ran out between 2016 and 2020. Commercial operators would offer priority services over the shiny new 4G networks being built out across the country. No new spectrum would be made available as the large UK mobile operators would provide certain guarantees to the government & the government would provide certain guarantees to the mobile operators, on the understanding that the cost to the government would be reduced. Once the aging TETRA network is switched off – in stages between 2016 and 2020 -, police officers and firemen will be using the same network as everyone else, competing with Facebook and Angry Birds for air-time and hoping that “necessary and appropriate safeguards” are in place.
The safety of the nation and the entire future of emergency services communications has been reduced to a simplistic 3-word slogan: “Cheaper, Better, Smarter”. So now let’s take a closer look at ESMCP. To be continued…
