“Today the system has been rolled out throughout Sweden, nationally”, says Janis Lövgren. “All the police forces use TETRA today and we are dismantling the old S70 and S80 radio.

“The only part of Sweden that still has that is the mountain area, where it’s close to impossible to build a new TETRA infrastructure, basically. No-one lives there and you don’t have any infrastructure whatsoever. No electricity!”

So for the present at least, S70 must live on in these remote wildernesses. “I have a plan for how we make that work”, Janis adds. “It’s a lot cheaper to have a separate system in just the one control room that manages that area than to keep it at every control room. We have built a separate system for them so they can manage that.”

For officers outside the main cities, adapting to TETRA has meant something of a challenge to their operating habits. “The small cities that had been using S70, during the evening they only have, say, five squad cars driving around”, Janis explains. “They opened a channel and whenever they needed something they just shouted out – whereas in Stockholm, where you have 100 police vehicles, you need to have better radio discipline!

“So there are differences in the usage of TETRA that we are trying to streamline.”

A TETRA laboratory

At police headquarters, the engineering team employs a variety of skill sets to maintain ‘governance’ of Cortex, Storm and the TETRA platform – a task which includes processing updates and upgrades in the software and systems nationally and adjusting to the continuing organizational changes in the police service.

Adjacent to its office space is a laboratory where much of the technical work is done. “It’s a test lab for all the new releases”, explains Johan Ferngren, governance manager for the TETRA project. “Whatever you send us, we try it and we test it before we deploy it to the Swedish National police.” Recently, the lab has been used to test a major software upgrade to the Steria Storm command and control system, a change which also requires training updates for operators nationwide.

Frequent updates are a feature of digital technologies, Janis points out. “The TETRA infrastructure is upgraded every year, or every other year, to a new release. So you don’t actually have a lot of choice. You have to keep up with development. So there will be development for the foreseeable future, and that has been a challenge for us, from a management perspective.

“In Sweden we collaborate a lot with other user organizations such as fire brigades, search and rescue, ambulances – they have their own command and control rooms and if they start adapting to a new release of TETRA, and start using features that we don’t have support for, that will make collaboration a lot more difficult.”

To address this responsibility, the team has its own TETRA system, purely for testing. “In the lab there are only the computers but we do have a switch, a couple of base stations and all the necessary equipment to do tests. So whenever we receive any updates, both on the infrastructure or on any of our command and control systems – it can be a Windows update we’ve received – before deploying it, we do test it thoroughly.”

If it passes this initial hurdle, the new software may be deployed on a pilot basis at one or several control rooms for users to test. Only after gaining this final approval will the software be deployed across Sweden. In some instances, the process has taken as long as a year.

Even after all that, things can go wrong at the last moment, Janis adds ruefully. “We’ve had situations where you arrive at the command and control room, you’ve been planning it for weeks or months, everyone is agreed that we will take down this part of the system at seven-thirty or eight o’clock. And then there’s a robbery, or a bomb threat. So you just step back and change your plans.

“Then of course we had the royal wedding recently, and we were not allowed to do any changes at all six months before that. Things happen! It’s not like upgrading normal IT systems, where the IT staff basically decide ‘Press Enter now’!”

New releases

Last year the Cassidian infrastructure of the Rakel network was upgraded to Release 5.5, adding a number of new features for users – and RPS has requested support in Cortex for these from APD. “We will be asking soon again, because now the plan for Sweden is to upgrade to Release 6, which I see as a major upgrade”, Janis continues. “Within Release 6 there are quite a few new features that we’ll benefit from operationally.

“One thing that is considered to be important in Sweden, at least, is the ISI – inter-system integration. That will give us the ability to communicate with Norway and Denmark. Then of course you’ll need to upgrade in Norway as well.”
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