However, he revealed that the growing popularity of social media has failed as yet to make much of an impact in this area, despite the 2200 bus users who signed up to a Twitter feed. “There’s no doubt that it affected the people who use that sort of service”, Mr Reed said. “But that’s a very small percentage of the 6·3 million bus journeys that we have every day. I think it is a valuable channel and there is some research going on in TfL now – we’re trying to find out what is the most useful channel. We spend phenomenal amounts of money publishing bits of paper and email, on bus shelters and on walls. It could be that we are completely wasting our time and we need to learn how to work better with partners and to use Twitter properly. But at the moment I think the judges are out.”

After TETRA

In the final presentation of the afternoon, two officials from the UK Home Office looked ahead towards a possible successor for the TETRA-based network currently used by Britain’s emergency services, a system owned and managed by Airwave Solutions. First to speak was Julian Sims, who heads the solutions development team for the Emergency Services Mobile Communications Programme (ESMCP). “We are looking across a very broad stakeholder group representing something towards 300 000 users”, he began. “That’s the emergency services, law enforcement, plus other special user groups.”

This project has been identified as one of the UK Government’s top 10 programmes – both for the capital spending likely to result from it and the associated technical risks. Its main focus is the options for a successor to the current TETRA technology, but it will also embrace the mobile data services that are currently provided by public network operators through local commercial contracts. The aim, Mr Sims continued, is to provide cost-effective, mission-critical voice and data services to the emergency services, law enforcement agencies and other government organizations from 2016. “That is a significant date, tied in with a fairly substantial series of expiries of current service contracts”, he added.

Business transformation

While working towards a smooth transition to a new system, whatever it might be, the team also hopes to bring to user organizations new opportunities for business change and business transformation which may flow from future broadband services. “So we are counting very, very carefully the benefits not only of our own activities but those of our end users as well”, Mr Sims said. “We have a team at the moment who are working very closely with the three emergency services’ representatives – business change managers from police, fire and ambulance – and we’ve got a very mature first draft of the requirements as they stand.

“They are written in output-based terms to enable industry to develop innovative solutions for us. We are not mandating solutions or what the solutions should look like. We are inviting industry to help us solve our challenge.... It’s there to provide a platform for contract specification. It gives industry latitude to provide cost-effective solutions and we are hoping to enable the use of COTS [commercial, off-the-shelf] solutions wherever possible.

“At the moment, we have a list of requirements that looks suspiciously like TETRA functionality plus a little bit more. But what we are trying to elicit, and we are working with the emergency services customers to do, is to think into the future, to develop new operating concepts and how they might take advantage of broadband comms if they have access to it. We are developing operating concepts, future operating models, we are trying to understand the relevant drivers of business change to provide more effective public services.”

New models, new tools

More information about the team’s approach was provided by Mr Sims’s colleague Cate Walton, head of technology for the project. “As you can imagine, we are going to put a huge amount more detail on this”, she said. “At the moment, these requirements look like availability: the users want availability, always. And they want coverage everywhere and they want instant call setup. So we’ve got quite a lot of work to do there. 

“We’ve got some interesting models coming out from particular recent events, some unplanned, in terms of how many users you might have in a small area and all that sort of thing. So we will be working that sort of stuff into more detailed requirements.”

The project would provide new tools, security and interoperability, and will aim to create a market of end-user devices that will allow users to access the best technology that is available to people in their private lives. 

“We anticipate that coverage may be provided in many different ways”, continued Ms Walton. “But how would you specify coverage when it might be provided by Wi-Fi and TETRA and commercial mobile networks. How do you say that that is covered or is not covered? It’s incredibly difficult.
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