In view of heightened security and safety measures at every major event these days, David Barrow of EADS Cogent asks why the UK hasn’t cottoned-on to the benefits of Tetrapol PMR?
Tetrapol is the world’s most widely deployed professional digital mobile communications standard, with over 80 wide area systems deployed in 35 countries. The standardised end-to-end encryption, combined with inbuilt security, provides the highest possible level of protection for voice and data communications. It is the only radio communications solution that has consistently proved its reliability and efficiency in high security deployments.
So why is the British public not enjoying the same level of service where their own safety is concerned?
The protection of the critical national communications infrastructure in the context of civil contingencies and the New Dimension of Risk is paramount. It is vital that not only should the design of the critical national communications infrastructure sustain national resilience, but also increase its effectiveness in resistance to attacks and response to challenges in whatever form they may take.
Right now, the UK does not have public safety communications networks that provide either resilience or interoperability as a standard, inherent capability.
Unfortunately, experience has shown time and time again that reliance upon a single system exposes vulnerability to the unexpected. This was starkly demonstrated when the county of Hampshire lost all 999 emergency services when the main public telephone exchange at Southampton failed. Although each service (including Hampshire Fire Brigade) thought they had resilience built in to their systems, this proved not to be the case.
Because all the emergency services relied primarily on the same type of connectivity they all suffered the same result. The police provided the only emergency communications available during this period via their independent legacy VHF system for motorway traffic cars. These were deployed to key points and provided a limited level of communication and coordination during the crisis. In short, the only Plan B was retired equipment.
In Manchester, a single tunnel fire took out two main BT cables and plunged a large area of the city into a communications crisis for both public and private users. It would appear that no resilience had been designed in to the system.
Without a national network that provides inherent resilience by design, as opposed to by costed option, the UK Government cannot demonstrate to the public that it has a robust strategy to respond to either planned or unplanned challenges and that it is actively contributing to national public safety. Private companies bidding for contracts may make economic sense, but not if cutting corners to cut costs puts lives at risk.
It is therefore critical that the forthcoming Firelink network for the UK Fire and Rescue Service delivers the added value, effective seamless interconnectivity and interoperability required to provide a comprehensive resilient platform for the emergency services of the United Kingdom.
It is well understood that in order to be effective in an emergency reaction situation, interoperability with other emergency services must be achieved, and designed to provide a graceful degradation of service in response to increasing levels of attack. This has been recognised by EADS and built into their proposed solution.
Under normal conditions, inter-agency interoperability can be provided via a variety of interconnections — PSTN, Private Circuit, Microwave, Free Space Optics, satellite — or any other technology capable of carrying traffic between the two networks. To provide first line resilience, however, at least two mechanisms should be employed that share no common infrastructure.
So, for example, should a PSTN link be lost between Fire and Police control-rooms, a dedicated link between the control-rooms can be used to maintain the connectivity.
Should a Control Room be removed from the Fire network, the infrastructure will respond transparently by providing all communications functions to the secondary control room. No manual action should be required if this ability is designed into the infrastructure.
In a case of major attacks where sub-parts of the network are affected — for example, the switching centre or base stations — the infrastructure is designed to cope, maintaining functionality with link re-routing and inbuilt graceful degradation, again based on its ability to react automatically.
In this scenario, emergency service officers on scene would be able to have group communication using the remaining isolated base stations set and fully interoperable handsets.
n the most serious of scenarios, it is possible that communications infrastructure would be lost entirely, leaving the Fire Fighters, Ambulance Service and Police Officers on the scene with only their handheld radios. With inbuilt interoperability, Fire officers can communicate in direct mode operation with neighbouring officers and Police officers and Paramedics can communicate in the same way, with a cross-band repeater interconnecting the two radio schemes.
Even at this level of incident, the national guidelines dictated by the principal officers’ group can be continuously realised as Silver Command level interoperability will be maintained.
The choice of technology for the forthcoming Firelink project is critical if it is to provide the UK with resilience in its emergency communications systems. Not only does Tetrapol exceed the requirements, it is also an environmentally attractive choice. While the number of base station sites required by a Tetrapol network is a fraction of that required for a Tetra network to provide the same coverage capability, it is also possible for Tetrapol networks to co-exist with current technologies on existing aerial masts, sharing sites with TV transmitters, mobile phone transceivers and transmitters using numerous other technologies — thus limiting the number of aerial masts required in any given region.
Due to the modulation protocol of the technology, Tetrapol meets the most stringent requirements towards all current systems installed on existing transmitter sites — effectively meaning that no new transmitter sites are required for a national network. Tetrapol has been tested in the UK by the Radio Communications Agency (now Ofcom) and found to meet the required European regulation EN 300-113, which determines whether radio equipment can safely co-exist with other electronic equipment.
Encryption
Tetrapol has inherent end-to-end encryption, as well as network resilience built into the core design. Maximum levels of resilience, redundancy and flexibility are designed into the system, at no extra cost, ensuring graceful degradation and no single point of failure.
It also provides a true national roaming capability in its design. Unlike the current police network that only operates on an area by area basis, a Tetrapol Firelink solution will allow the Service, from day one, to communicate across brigade boundaries and with the other emergency services and agencies involved in civil protection. Any extension of coverage to the Airwave network will require additional funding from local Police budgets which are already overstretched — and this could mean a compromise between communications and manpower.
The EADS solution has been proven around the world, and can deliver improved domestic public safety, increase the resilience of the UK’s Critical National Infrastructure, and provide a second national communications system as a vital fall-back if a catastrophic incident disabled existing networks.
In order to ensure that UK public safety communications systems can cope in the event of a major disaster, it is imperative that they have national, resilient, interoperable communications that enable them to deliver on their operational commitments to the public. To this end, EADS as a large system integrator fully supports programmes being implemented by government which are fundamental to this aspiration.