Prospects for TETRA in a time of spending cuts

Sue Lampard: I think there is merit in doing both.There is a lot of inefficiency and ways to cut budgets. Equally, I think there are areas where if you invest technology can actually help us.

There are parallel streams at Government level; the Cabinet Office is working on civil contingencies with the National Resilience Extranet and all the products that go with that and then you have the NPIA programme, which has tried to join up all the technology in the command and control world.

There is huge scope for investment to join those two worlds in terms of interoperability and cross partnerships, not just with the blue light services, but also with Cat 1, Cat 2 responders. So, I think the answer to the question is both, but how do you do it in a logical and mature way with so many distinct partners across the UK?

Gert Jan Wolf: It is quite important to understand that most of these networks are not being used to their full potential. I would say invest in a part where you could enhance the network in many ways and make people’s jobs more effective.

If you do that by investing in technology, you would also be saving costs at the same time. If you implement more data applications it will save you costs on airtime or even speech, as well as making things easier for the police on the street. For, example filling out drop down reports on their TETRA PDAs instead of going back in the office.

Duncan Swan: We have got to make a long-term dent into the money we owe; the obvious thing is just to cut. But that really is pretty short sighted considering that what we are looking at is a long-term deficit. So there has to be a balance between investing wisely and investing to make a short term gains, but also to make sure that in the medium to long term we are building a position where it is not going to cost significantly more than it needs to.

If all we do now with the Airwave network is just maximise it as best we can to get maximum efficiency out of it from a user perspective and try and make sure users are not paying any more than they have to. It’s keeping that to the core costs. That means cutting back rather than moving any further forward with the network. But we need to ensure that when the decision is made to replace Airwave around 2019/20 there isn’t a huge gap that has to be filled.

We need to be investing now in making sure that in the future when we are making decisions in the years ahead to maybe buy terminals or command control equipment, we are making those decisions so that it will actually take those investments beyond whatever the next system is after Airwave. It might be still be Airwave, but it might be something different. So, people need to understand the money that is being spent at the moment is actually going to be in some ways future proof, that it is being spent looking forward not just in the short term,but also in medium and long term.

Phil Kidner: I actually agree with what has just been said. It was a shock to me to see a Home Secretary say for the first time in my life time that we need to make cuts and will get rid of some policeman, I never thought I would hear that said. I think that has created a whole different new culture. Let’s say that 80% of any police force budget is in staff and IT and technology is a very small percentage of the remaining 20%.

So, if you are prepared to cut 10-20% of your workforce in the public sector, then you have got to be prepared to cut the same or more from your IT and technology budget. So, I don’t see any investment in the short to medium term in the UK in technology. I think what we are going to have to do is make the best of what we have got. We won’t be investing in the short or medium term for beyond 2020, which is my fear, but I think a grounded fear.

Josh Berle: It does mean that a lot is due to happen curiously in the next Parliament and in a way that is where a lot of the potential for problems lie. Because of the long term nature of government procurement, the nature of the contracts and the time it takes to roll out dedicated networks, without some difficult decision making now, the next Parliament will find things even more difficult.

It is wholly unrealistic to expect any significant investment in technology around blue light communications at the moment. So, the issue should focus much more on how you can improve the productivity of those people who are lucky enough to remain in their posts.

The technology they use has to be more demonstrable in terms of its ability to improve the productivity of those remaining front line personnel, because the challenge that politicians will face is how they can still claim that front line services have not been overly impacted by the reduction in numbers. So, what little investment there is likely to be, will almost certainly have to be focussed.

Rodrigo Franciscani: We are trying to focus more on how we see the investment in terms of our customers and I would say the way forward is to focus investment to make the most out of your devices and network. We are working with our customers to try and help them with training, features and mobile data and making sure our customers, who are working unfortunately in a time of cuts with less people, can be as efficient as they were before through focussed investment. 

Andrew Walker: When you take a very large amount of money in one hit from an organisation it can paralyse that organisation. You are liable to lose a slice and that makes the communication and effectiveness of that organisation much more difficult. So, the people who have got the money and the people who hold the budgets have got to work out what their priorities are.

So, if we don’t offer solutions that are, or can be shown to be, revenue neutral in a fairly short time, they won’t be interested in investing now to gain in two or three years time. Because if you look at the scale of those cuts, they are being hit now and over the next four years, but they don’t have four years to get a payback, they have got to get it now.

Some of the things like mobile data is fascinating and interesting and challenging, but unless you can deliver intelligent solutions that solves the problem that they have got now, that they can see payback very quickly.

I think that is the key thing for the supplier organisations is to be able to keep in touch with the right people and be able to deliver them long-term victories in small biteable chunks, rather then attempt to sell them big systems that are going to take ages to roll out.

SUE LAMPARD: It’s a challenge in my experience because we have put in back end systems for HR and for finance and candidly they haven’t been too brilliant. Probably if you measure the efficiency, we are less efficient than we were. We will get there but it is going to take a number of years to develop because we haven’t really understood our business processes.

The problem is that the people who hold the budget and make the decisions don’t always recognise what the technology can do for them. There are people in the middle that have knowledge of both the technical and the business sides, but I think those sort of people are few and far between. I think with the new culture of budget cuts, we are actually now really beginning to understand and do proper business cases. Life is getting better, but we probably don’t have that expertise, certainly in the technology.

ANDREW WALKER: I would want some governmental organisation that was acting as a central evangelist for either the police or for the whole radio consumer market and the IT section, to be a centre of expertise and say this is where we ought to be going.

GERT JAN WOLF: I remember one of the situations in the Netherlands where there was an increase of information about data over the TETRA network and what happened was that within the Dutch ministry, they opened their ears and eyes to tried to understand what the possibilities were. Many manufacturers tried to make them understand what the possibilities were, but by forcing a trial it made the government find some money and invest in that trial and then to invest in that technology. In many cases, if you really can show that technology will benefit a certain situation money becomes available from somewhere.

PHIL KIDNER: I think that is yesterday’s thinking. I don’t think there is any money and I don’t think you can say to government: ‘Well things will be all right in a couple of year and you’ll have money and you’ll invest because this is good.’ Government is not making decisions today based on operational considerations; it is making them purely on financial ones. I think that we should be involved in making police forces more efficient

I think the money has to come from outside. We could have a South East counties police force and then exploit what we have with the current TETRA network. Put lots of good applications in, but get Airwave to buy them and the police will lease them off them. We’ve got to find the most affordable way of doing it and that is to get somebody else to put the capital in.

JOSH BERLE: Those of us on the supply side have to be very mindful of talking about whizzback solutions and overselling them to very wary and weary customers. Everyone is very suspicious of the next big thing that is going to solve all their problems.

But that means from the police perspective being much clearer about defining what the key processes are that they see as requiring technological assistance. You have to be able to demonstrate that we as an organisation do this and these technologies will help us cut our costs by whatever and the proof of that is here. That is the only way I think you are going to be able to do that.

However, there is a huge shortage of available capital. So under those circumstances, those of us in the private sector, maybe in league with the public sector, will have to get a lot more innovative in the ways we actually present commercial models. That means thinking a lot more clearly about potential partnerships and maybe in some cases consolidation.

Maybe suppliers have to take more risks if they really want to be able to sell their wares. If we put the money upfront and we will gain some of the savings that we would anticipate actually realising. I’m sure we will have to see more of that if we want to see a continuation of investment to any greater extent. It’s a combination of innovation and shouldering risk on the supply side and on the buying side an ability to actually evidence what the true benefits of change are.

GERT JAN WOLF:  There is always money, but you need to spend it wisely and you need to prove that the technology works, what it can do for them and how it can save money.

JOSH BERLE: If you can link the cutting of manpower to much better use of your IT, than to an extent you would argue in an ideal world where all the evidence you would ever want is available, actually IT budgets ought to be protected and possibly expanded ironically enough. If you can answer that question of increasing productivity where most of the money is being spent, then actually you are doing a lot more to justify your own existence.

RODRIGO FRANCISCANI: I totally agree with the business case. We need to make sure the business case for investment is nice and clear and actually justifies the tactical investment. We try to help our customers who are driving the business efficiencies by looking into how can technology help, for example, mobile data, WAP push and location based types of applications. Yes, these things require a tactical investment, but if you can prove the return on it and you can actually justify the investment.

Training is another critical area that we are helping with by adding new e-learning packages. Linked to the telephony capability of TETRA terminals (cell phone replacement), for instance; how can I make use of this terminal in a way that I can cut costs somewhere else? We are also talking to our customers about alternative ways of procuring terminals, for instances – a rental or a lease type of approach.

The other side of it is, how can customers reduce their spend on technology itself? So with devices, we can add features by remote programming, for instance, and that will help reduce operational costs. We can provide managed services to our customers by giving them a very good long-term view; for instance, accidental damage cover. So, you actually could plan your long-term budget more efficiently and achieve savings there.

Another way of reducing Opex for our customers, is to be more efficient on energy consumption. Some of the latest hardware in our core equipment can actually use 50% less energy.So, we can produce a business case that will then allow our customers to say, yes we will invest in this, this is my return and we have a reduced footprint on the core equipment. 

SUE LAMPARD: The issue is how you make change happen effectively? Should it be at national level or do you try and create pockets of good practice by working with an individual organisations and building from the bottom up? Airwave is our only national product. The police have historically just used it as a push to talk; the fire brigade is now in danger of doing the same thing, because the training package hasn’t in some cases been as good or been put in place. It is a real dilemma because every time we have some sort of national roll out, frankly, it has not worked very well because you have different processes, cultures, organisations and levels of buying, in terms of what individual forces or brigades are prepared to do. It is really challenging. There doesn’t really seem to be a strategy. 

DUNCAN SWAN: You do wonder, if you look at the blue light services, whether now is the time to say let’s have a department of homeland security. If you can bring the blue light agencies together all of a sudden you have got quite a powerful body, which could bring the various different requirements that they have got and pull them together. Then we are looking at how a national network, such as Airwave, can be co-ordinated and be thought about properly.

SUE LAMPARD: Same with crime control.

DUNCAN SWAN: If you push it down into police regionalisation it would probably make a lot of sense to have a number of regional of these forces. The ambulance forces went to 33 ambulance trusts in England down to 11 and they did that without any budget being made available.

And they basically rationalised their communication control centres. They have now got mobile phone contracts, which sit across each of the ambulance trusts. They have got IT networks, which are rolling out, probably not as quick as they ought to, but consolidated together, and they have just gone on and done it.

The police service at the moment they are looking at some good regional ideas. If you have got two or three good guys in three or four forces then you suddenly have got a pool of talent that you can bring together and then you do have enough people to be considering how you match technology with the operational side of things. But trying doing that with 43 different islands.

ANDREW WALKER: The interesting areas is the management skill in making that happen properly. I have seen areas of the country I won’t mention, where police forces co-operate beautifully together. And, then you make them co-operate and it falls flat on its face. That is a real problem, because you then get the antithesis of the nirvana you are actually aiming for, which is people co-operating and working together and innovating. And the people who know where the problems are, are the people who experience them everyday.

DUNCAN SWAN: That level is working really well in collaboration. There are a whole host of projects that people aren’t shouting about, but they are going on across the country at the moment in different areas in terms of technology and procurement.

JOSH BERLE: I suppose one concern I have is that on the one hand you have got national policy which is all about cutting money, which is obviously therefore driving collaboration. On the other hand, the current government is in a way trying to bolster localism with the idea of these commissioners. My fear is, this will lead to confusion in the way that will work.

GERT JAN WOLF: Do those people within the government really understand the full potential of the TETRA network? In my experience they don’t and if I speak to the police officers on the street, they don’t know either. The only thing they want to do is to push-to-talk, because they are used to doing that. But if you teach these people to use a radio at its full potential you will get more understanding about the technology that comes with it and they will be more open minded to newer technologies and to new solutions.

That starts with training maybe. The suppliers know a lot of information. We know about the network and what it can do for the people, but I think the knowledge is stuck somewhere within the communications as well.

SUE LAMPARD: I agree. Community intelligence is at the root of policing and can often be what leads to serious and organised crime gangs and terrorist activity being discovered. A disparate service would not be effective because you would end up with silos. Where there were regional silos, these would potentially become national.

JOSH BERLE: Curiously, Airwave has been one system that has not been a barrier to any regionalisation or change in organisational structure, because it is a national platform and in a sense fairly vanilla.

SUE LAMPARD: But people have made it a barrier, the technology is there, but people just have not used it.

GERT JAN WOLF:  How are newer users of TETRA technology adopting the technology and how do they spend the money?

DUNCAN SWAN: The later adopters have probably got significantly more. If you look at where the Motorola TETRA system is being rolled out currently you have got full TETRA IV connections you can do so much more from a data perspective in terms of short data.

GERT JAN WOLF: You use more applications?

DUNCAN SWAN: You can start to use the power of command and control, whether you are using voice communications or data communications, it is all there as IP commandments. In the UK, we are constrained by the fact that Airwave is an analogue delivery for voice, because in 2000 that’s what there was; it’s as simple as that.

PHIL KIDNER: You’re right,TETRA IV definitely is the future. But I also think that we could do a lot more with what we have currently got, not necessarily in public safety, where they make extensive use of TETRA today for applications.

China Light Power, a Hong Kong electricity company, bought a radio system because they wanted to put TETRA on their electricity poles, so if there was a blip in the electricity supply a status message was sent back to the control room.

So that’s what they bought and used their radio system for. But they now use it for tasking their engineers by short data – go to 123 high street install a cooker; they use it for voice of course and they use it for man down when someone is hanging from a pylon and they can reach a certain angle and send a message. They have invested in the technology, but looked at all the other opportunities and that’s what we haven’t done.

RODRIGO FRANCISCANI: When we talk about mobile data it is not all or nothing. If we look into the web portals today there are quite a few applications which you could run on TETRA with simple templates and database queries, for example, accessing the PNC (police national computer) database.

Or you can use it today with a soft refresh and run WAP push and then you go into the more PDA, EDA type of devices. The ES400 we have launched can have a lot of form filling applications and then for the more robust user you could have the mobile data terminals in your car. So, these are really levels that you could start on.

GERT JAN WOLF: When I started my online service I was astonished by the actual amount of applications and possibilities that are able to run over a TETRA network. Manufacturers and consultants tend to only talk about a specific area of interest to customers, but there are a lot of other smaller companies who have great solutions, but who are not visible to the world.

SUE LAMPARD: The end user needs to be able to say ‘this is my vision for what I wanted to be able to do’.

The problem we have got is that our technical people trot off to conferences and see what’s there, but the people who actually run the business, don’t necessarily know what’s available and therefore don’t even have the vision.

GERT JAN WOLF: The communication that doesn’t get communicated to the people internally.

PHIL KIDNER: The flip side of what you are saying is also important, the underlying TETRA network has got to work efficiently and it has got to be easy for these applications to be used and that has not always been the case for the TETRA network in the UK and elsewhere.

DUNCAN SWAN: One of the beauties of what we have in the TETRA network and with any of the majority of the other high-end radio technologies as well, is that you can get short data applications. It is not expensive to get them written. The expensive bit is actually distributing the applications on each of the terminals and the back office integration always seems to have a significantly high price tag on it. That makes it difficult to get the benefit, but the actual applications themselves are very reasonably priced.

 JOSH BERLE: You really have to get that intelligence about what the day to day pain is and it is not easy getting that. The chief constable of Suffolk said: ‘My problem is I have got to manage Ipswich on a Friday night, it absorbs loads of my resource. My big headache is getting all of those guys who work in the outlying districts of Suffolk to come in and who don’t have any familiarity with the area. How do we brief them without us having to get on to a mobile phone or take up lots of air time on the Airwave terminal to tell them this is where you have to go and this what you have to do?

So when it comes to mobile data, the question is how can we help with that sort of situation, what kind of process could you instigate that could actually be supported by an existing asset like Airwave or indeed something else that might be there?

RODRIGO FRANCISCANI: A lot of data today is available from police and emergency services into other frontiers, maybe on to the web, maybe on to different types of systems that could easily by integrated into the TETRA network.

GERT JAN WOLF: Isn’t it a question that the use of data applications over TETRA is being withheld by the fact that a lot of governments think that it takes too huge load of the network and it interferes with voice transmission?

JOSH BERLE: My impression is it is more a prejudice about bandwidth. Which as we just discussed is misplaced because the nature of the applications that are needed don’t necessarily require bandwidth.

SUE LAMPARD: The other side of it is the licensing arrangement. We have a sharers licence for local authorities because frankly it is not a good business case for them to actually have the full Airwave, but in principle you want them to be using Airwave everyday. Because we do have incidents every day where local authorities and county councils do get involved and you want to have that inter-operability. But there is a barrier to that at the moment, because they can only have a sharers licence and technically we can only use it for seven days.

DUNCAN SWAN: One of the best ways for these budgets to be trimmed would be for a more shared arrangement across different government departments and local government. It is not so much bandwidth issue, but when you get to the outer fringes of public safety environment there has been quite a lot of debate over what some of these other organisations, utilities for example, should be allowed access to.

Often there has been quite strict interpretation of the sharers licence such that you can only gain access if you can demonstrate that there is a definite need for you to inter-operate primarily with the police organisation, possibly with ambulance and fire.

It is often held up those situations, there was a huge brouhaha with the RSPCA for example with those who deal with them less say in London, thinking what is this about. Where as actually those in rural locations, Sussex for example do actually work very closely with the RSPCA on many occasions, for example, around hunting. It is actually quite an important issue.

SUE LAMPARD: And that again is where it brings in the resilient telecoms planning contingencies, because you can justify those sharers licences for that one event that happens every 15 years. But the reality is that you really want to be doing it every day in a lot of instances.

ANDREW WALKER: It is the same struggle about suppliers finding new ways of selling kit to new customers. What about the recession?

PHIL KIDNER: I have heard a different conversation: the police service saying we haven’t got our act together; we don’t really know what we want. That comes back to my opening gambit that we have got to make the best use of what we have. The end users have to say what it is they actually want before you guys can step up to the table and say we can offer you this and that.

JOSH BERLE: If you can’t bring in anything new you just have to work with what you have got. If there was a strategic decision over the next five years to just deal with what you have got, ok, incremental investments here and there, but no revolution, and that’s a good starting point, at least you are thinking within the boundaries of the economics.

SUE LAMPARD: I am saying to suppliers now I don’t want to give you any money, but if you want to come and help us change our business processes and take some of the cut from it, that is the way to do it.

GERT JAN WOLF: And that means understanding what the network can do for you.

DUNCAN SWAN: When we talk about power and energy, but the kit that is in there at the moment is from 2000, which is all pretty old technology now. It needs somebody to innovate and change things around. It cost us to change this round, but the savings you make will be greater than the cost of changing. That potentially is a way of moving things forward quite quickly, but that’s a really hard nettle to grasp for Airwave.

JOSH BERLE: There are solutions there: a lot of our technology partner Motorola’s new kit is much more power efficient. I suppose the balance is between what the cost of that new technology will be, but at the same time you have got to recognise that there is existing kit in there that works, it is pretty reliable, its trusted and it could be sweated for sometime yet before you address the issue of refresh.

ANDREW WALKER: While that old technology is in use, user organisations should be progressing in other areas. But there is this real dilemma and needs to be looked at from a, it’s going to cost x to do this, but the savings are ‘y’. Is the ‘y saving’ in one year, two years, 10 or 15 years?

JOSH BERLE: It is natural it is going to be fairly long-term, by which I mean maybe over a decade. Don’t forget we are only half way through the Airwave contract.

JOSH BERLE: We should not to think that the situation that we are in at the moment is financially so bad that you adopt a complete and utter scrorched earth policy and assume that TETRA is going to be the only thing for the next 50 years or so. You should have enough confidence to intelligently look at what savings can be made now by incremental investment and evolution of the current technology, whilst being aligned to the fact there will inevitably be something that is available, probably later rather than sooner, given the size of the public safety market. But any successor technology like LTE will have to be pretty well proven before it takes on the key functions that TETRA was designed for, like push-to-talk and emergency button.

ANDREW WALKER: I think there are lots of things going on, but who is going to make that decision? The trouble with going to a public system is that it doesn’t deliver many of the operational requirements. What’s LTE’s interest in TETRA? There is probably none: there are 250,000 TETRA radios in the UK and 66 million GSM phones, so where does the investment go? The initiative has got to come from us. We have got to find a way of moving our communications towards LTE, rather than expect LTE to come to us.

PHIL KIDNER: I think you do need TETRA everywhere, but you might also need the facility and functionality of LTE everywhere. But the cost is going to be prohibitive and I just don’t see any spectrum in Europe to deliver LTE.

DUNCAN SWAN: If you went with LTE you could you use a globally produced device whose production runs into millions of units. But it would be a mobile device, it won’t necessarily be something that is robust, that has decent battery life and is ‘cop proof’.

RODRIGO FRANCISCANI: I think our take on it is that because of all the characteristics of TETRA, the resiliency, the call set up times and the comprehensive group call features, it is going to be the technology of choice for a number of years on core voice technology and features for public safety. We see LTE coming in as broadband data overlay.

DUNCAN SWAN: I personally don’t think we will ever see another technology that delivers better voice services than TETRA. Looking forward, nobody is going to want to give up what they have got. It is going to be very important to keep all of those voice services on whatever the next solution is. I use the word solution because it is more than likely going to be something with multiple bearers and overlays in terms of data.

JOSH BERLE: Unless of course you take the view that you need to sweat that asset for longer and longer and then of course it becomes incrementally cheaper if we cut the cost of power and get cheaper switching, for example. I think at the moment given what we said about TETRA and the desire for key operationally functions to be kept, it means there is going to be much life left in that particularly old dog.

ANDREW WALKER: It is not just an old dog, the German government are currently rolling out a system that is potentially twice as big as the UK and they are doing that today and they are not doing that today because they think TETRA is nice mature old technology, they are thinking that actually there is a future for it.

DUNCAN SWAN: I wouldn’t like to in Airwaves shoes at the moment, just at the point at when all your revenue streams are now coming online. The exact point in time when everybody says you need to cut back, half way through the contract, is the exact time when a forward looking organisation would start to invest. But it is just going to be impossible now everybody is looking to save money, because that is the sort of thing the government will be looking to pull back. Airwave won’t be exempt.

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