UK public-safety agencies caught in middle of much-delayed proposed Airwave-ESN transition

Costs associated with the UK Home Office’s failure to deliver the LTE-based Emergency Services Network (ESN) as a replacement for the TETRA-based Airwave system owned by Motorola Solutions should not be borne solely by public-safety agencies, according to the head of a Parliament committee overseeing the ESN project.

ESN was supposed to be completed in time to provide mission-critical communications to UK public-safety agencies by the end of 2019, which was when the Home Office’s original contract with Airwave was scheduled to expire. Instead, the ESN project has been the subject of multiple delays, with Home Office officials this spring expressing uncertainty about whether the public-safety broadband project will be finished by the end of this decade.

Meg Hillier, chair of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), reiterated her long-held concerns about the ESN project in a statement released with the publication of the PAC’s report on the matter that was published last Friday.

“The ESN project is a classic case of optimism bias in government,” Hillier said in the prepared statement. “There has never been a realistic plan for ESN and no evidence that it will work as well as the current system.

“Assertions from the Home Office that it will simply ‘crack on’ with the project are disconnected from the reality, and emergency services cannot be left to pick up the tab for continued delays. With £2 billion [$2.618 billion, based on current exchange rates] already spent on ESN and little to show for it, the Home Office must not simply throw good money after bad.”

Currently, the Home Office is in the process of selecting a vendor—more likely, a group of vendors—to replace Motorola Solutions as the contractor to provide key public-safety applications, such as a mission-critical-push-to-talk (MCPTT). Motorola Solutions officially exited the ESN project in December 2022 after the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced its plans to implement price controls that would slash contracted Airwave revenue to Motorola Solutions by about 40%, resulting in a projected loss of more than $1 billion for the company.

In May, the Home Office released a procurement document, and interested vendors were supposed to submit responses last month. To date, no official information has been released about the number of submissions that were received by the deadline.

Hillier expressed concerns about this procurement strategy.

“The Home Office told our inquiry that it admits the commercial approach taken with ESN is suboptimal, but will be pursuing it regardless,” Hillier said. “New risks will be created if it now rushes procurement or delivery as it searches for a replacement main contractor. The risks of outsourcing services must be better managed, as the government is still accountable for value for money when it does so.”

This procurement and business-model issue was detailed further in the PAC report.

“The [Home Office] Department acknowledged that if it looked at ESN through a purely commercial, financial or technical lens, it would not retain its current approach, which it called a ‘recommended’ rather than ‘preferred’ option,” according to the PAC report.

“It felt that had it been able to start again with a blank sheet of paper it would probably prefer to adopt a prime contractor approach, which would allow it to step back from the systems integration role. But it felt constrained by the need to turn off Airwave off as quickly as possible, which meant it could only make ‘tweaks’ to the programme’s commercial structure.”

Proving the ESN is worth the investment could be challenging for the Home Office, according to the PAC report.

“The [Home Office] Department’s original objectives for ESN were to save money and bring mobile data to emergency services,” the PAC report states. “It will now take at least 10 years from now for the potential savings to recoup the total cost of ESN. The Department said it would not be certain about costs or benefits until it revised the program’s business case, which it expected to do in 2024.”

While the ESN delays have meant that the Home Office has spent less than originally expected on the ESN, the delays have not as kind to the budgets of cash-strapped public-safety agencies throughout the UK, the PAC report states.

Police, fire and ambulance services have spent at least 20.5 million pounds ($26.825 million) to fund transition efforts to the ESN that have not been able to be used.

In addition, the lack of an ESN replacement has meant that public-safety agencies have had to purchase replacement TETRA equipment that was an unplanned expense, as the Airwave TETRA system was supposed to be retired by the end of 2019.

“Police forces estimate that Airwave devices cost £125 million since 2018, and expect to spend another £25m by 2026,” according to the PAC report.

Even when if the ESN is completed, there are significant questions about how it will operate at a practical level, according to the PAC report.

“The [Home Office] Department has not yet decided who will be responsible for running ESN and has paused work planning the live service operations,” the PAC report states. “The fire service said it had seen limited lack information about how this would work, for example, it was not clear whether Home Office would run ESN, as happens with Airwave.”

The PAC report also described a bleak picture for the overall ESN ecosystem in the future, based on current plans.

“The Independent Assurance Panel pointed out that innovations and benefits would only happen after the network was completed, and may require software and an app store,” the PAC report states. “However, the ESN programme no longer expects to provide any apps, other than to enable push‑to-talk.”

ESN deployment delays have meant that UK public-safety agencies have turned to commercial alternatives as a method to access broadband capabilities. These commercial offerings—expected to be less expensive or similarly priced to the ESN, when it is available—could hamper agencies’ desire to adopt ESN in the future, according to the PAC report.

“Police explained that almost all forces use mobile data via commercial tablets, laptops and smartphones, and the benefits from ESN enhancing these with priority access to data were not clear,” the PAC report states.

“The fire service said that its services were also using data and had already realised some of the benefits ESN was originally planned to bring. It also warned that, the longer these commercial services were used, the greater the risk that fire services would not agree to replace them with ESN.”

Home Office officials may feel increased pressure to deliver the ESN by the fact that France last fall announced the selection of a vendor consortium to deliver its Réseau Radio du Futur (RRF, or Radio Network of the Future). The initial buildout phase of the RRF is scheduled to be completed in Paris and at surrounding athletic venues in time for first responders to use the broadband-communications functionalities while securing the Summer Olympics next year.

Hillier noted this fact during a Public Accounts Committee hearing conducted on April 26.

“Well, if the French can deliver by 2024, it raises lots of questions,” Hillier said during the April hearing.

During the 5×5 Summit last month in San Diego, RRF Program Director Claire Raynal told IWCE’s Urgent Communications that the Olympic-focused areas of France—13 of the more than 90 regions in the country—are scheduled to be ready in June 2024.

Renaud Mellies—head of international cooperation, standardization and innovation at the French Ministry of the Interior’s RRF program—said French first responders will not be using the RRF for their primary mission-critical communications during the Summer Olympics.

“No. They will be using the TETRAPOL system in France,” Mellies told IWCE’s Urgent Communications during the 5×5 Summit. “It will be a display of what’s possible, and what better time to use it than during the Olympic Games?”

Mellies said that the RRF is scheduled to be operational nationwide in 2027, when the broadband network is expected to replace the narrowband TETRAPOL system.

“We should be able to disconnect the narrowband network [in 2027],” Mellies said. “[The idea is] not to operate two networks at the same time. [The French TETRAPOL system is] an end-of-life/end-of-support network; it costs a lot of money, and the money would be better invested in a broadband network.”

In addition to France, the United States has completed the initial five-year buildout of its nationwide FirstNet public-safety broadband system, according to contractor AT&T (this work is still in process of being validated by the FirstNet Authority).

One key difference between FirstNet and the ESN is that FirstNet was not mandated to replace narrowband LMR systems for public safety, although FirstNet does support multiple broadband push-to-talk services and offers a 3GPP standards-compliant MCPTT offering.

Still, the fact that the much larger FirstNet system—the UK geographically is about the size of Oregon—has completed a nationwide buildout before ESN represents a stark turnaround in the deployment timelines announced a decade ago.

In June 2013, a UK Home Office official announced plans to migrate public-safety agencies from the Airwave TETRA network to an LTE-based system beginning in 2016. In contrast, the FirstNet Authority at the time was being led by a board that was less than a year old and had not made any tangible decisions about the future of its proposed public-safety broadband system.

The PAC report noted that such progress elsewhere in the world could help UK officials realize the ESN vision.

“Since 2015, the market for the technology underpinning ESN has matured, so we asked whether ESN is now easier to deliver,” the PAC report states. “The Department agreed that the programme was no longer at the cutting edge of technology.

“It told us that several other countries are now taking a similar approach to ESN, although some use a dedicated network, and others have involved multiple network operators. This means that rather than leading the way, the UK can now learn lessons from other countries.”