An exercise in goodwill
Consolidation of multijurisdiction radio communications can be a tricky business, fraught with political, territorial and technical issues. Who would have guessed that the merging of Toronto’s metropolitan area police and fire networks could generate goodwill? So much goodwill, in fact, that the city’s ambulance service would plan to join them as well.
That is exactly what happened when Toronto’s police and fire departments decided to merge their 800MHz networks and share facilities a couple of years ago, said Dan Perlstein, program manager of wireless networks for Toronto Police.
“It was an amazing experience, the amount of goodwill and good wishes from both services, as they came together,” Perlstein said.
Only a few years ago, what is now Toronto was actually six discrete cities, each with its own police and fire departments.
However, in a bid to reduce its municipal transfer payments, the Ontario provincial government forced the six cities to merge in January 1998. Toronto is now Canada’s largest city — more than four million people call it home.
To enable its mission to keep the public safe, the Toronto police use about 5,000 Motorola analog and digital radio units in the field. The Toronto Fire Department deploys about 1,000 Motorola radios, and Toronto EMS uses about 350 Ericsson radios. The city’s public safety networks broadcast from 16 towers over a range of 70 frequencies.
The seven original police departments had already consolidated communications into a multijurisdictional radio network before the great municipal merger. The fire departments, however, were still maintaining separate radio systems.
For the fire departments, the big question was how to combine networks while maintaining their quick response time. Meanwhile, the Toronto police department was busy redesigning its networks so that it could add mobile data communications.
“As it turned out, the opportunity was there to work with another public safety department which was in the midst of doing similar things,” Perlstein said.
“We were supposed to trunk a number of frequencies to gain more capacity. They were supposed to amalgamate their various systems and trunk them as well,” he said.
The combining of the cities wasn’t the only cause for the police and fire departments to work together. The lack of immediate redundancy for Toronto-area 9-1-1 service also spurred the merger.
“Before the amalgamation, the police were handling Toronto’s 9-1-1 service,” Perlstein said. “Should that service go down, or the building be evacuated, the procedure was that we would bus our people to our backup control center.”
PSAPs and preparedness
Performing such a transfer could take up to an hour, though, during which time Toronto would be without a backup 9-1-1 service.
Faced with this situation, the Toronto Police Department began to wonder if there was a way to create a “hot backup” — one that would allow them to keep 9-1-1 operating, no matter what happened.
The answer turned out to be cooperation with the Toronto Fire Department and Toronto EMS. Between them, these two services had enough radio staff to provide a meaningful backup, Perlstein said.
The result was that the TFD and Toronto EMS agreed to jointly provide a “hot-switch” backup for Toronto Police 9-1-1. There would be no more hour-long waits. Whatever happened, Toronto was covered.
Joint training facilities
The next step in this consolidation was the use of the backup control centers as training facilities.
“We’re training, the fire department is training, and the ambulance service is training,” Perlstein said. “So I figured, ‘Why don’t we use these backup control centers as training facilities?’”
From there, it was a short step to merging three networks into one. If one of three services lost its dispatch center, the other two would cover for it while its backup center was being activated.
Consolidation conflict
Currently, Toronto Police and Fire are working jointly using Motorola technology. Although Toronto EMS is committed to consolidation, its current Ericsson infrastructure inventory is said to prevent it from doing so.
“Their radios are just about due for replacement,” Perlstein said. “We’re working with them to figure out their needs, so that we can all work together.”
‘We’ve already saved the city $5 million in capital costs by running an integrated network,’ Perlstein said.
It wasn’t simple to amalgamate Toronto’s police and fire networks. For one thing, the two departments had to coordinate their response areas so that the joint network would serve fire and police equally. “The main issue here is that it’s got to be a win-win situation,” Perlstein said.
There was also the issue of who would run what. As it turned out, the Toronto Police Department already had a large maintenance facility, so the department took responsibility for maintaining and supporting the physical plant. Meanwhile, the TFD took on the lion’s share of infrastructure administration to balance the load.
Pooling police and fire bandwidth was another area of cooperation. “We chipped in a number of frequencies consistent with our traffic, and they did likewise,” Perlstein said. The same was the case for towers; everyone shared what they had.
The final issue was “culture.” Anyone who has been around police and fire employees know that the two operate in separate worlds, with different ways of doing things. Making the two meet was no easy task. However, goodwill went a long way in solving these problems.
Savings through efficiency
Since Toronto’s police and fire departments starting working together a year ago, the savings have started piling up.
“We’ve already saved the city $5 million in capital costs by running an integrated network,” Perlstein said.
It used to cost about $700,000 a year to run both departments’ radio networks. Today, the price range is closer to $345,000 to $415,000 annually, including the improvements in 9-1-1 efficiency.
Commitment to consolidation
This amalgamation resulted in better service and lower costs. It didn’t cause friction between its partners. No one is more amazed that Dan Perlstein. Even a year after the event, he can’t believe how well it has all gone. What has been a nightmare elsewhere has proven to be a dream in Toronto.
“There was a lot of willingness on all sides to make this work,” Perlstein said.
Careless is a freelance telecommunications journalist based in Ottawa, ON, Canada. His email address is [email protected].
