UK Home Office targets ESN rollout by 2029, CMA document says

UK Home Office officials told the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) that it hopes to replace Motorola Solution as a vendor for the Emergency Services Network (ESN) in about a year and intends to complete the LTE-based public-safety network by 2029, according to a CMA document released last week.

Home Office officials provided the informal update to the deployment timeline for the ESN—the much-delayed UK broadband network that is supposed to replace the Airwave TETRA system owned by Motorola Solutions—during a December hearing with the CMA, which is finishing its investigation of pricing associated with Airwave services.

In 2015, Motorola Solutions was selected as the contractor for Lot 2 of the ESN, which meant the vendor would be in charge of developing the software and services for the ESN—notably, the mission-critical-push-to-talk (MCPTT) solution that would allow the Airwave TETRA system to be shut down in 2019. But the ESN rollout is still years from being completed, resulting in the Home Office signing two multi-year extensions—deals that UK officials are unduly expensive—that currently would keep Airwave operating through 2026.

Meanwhile, Motorola Solutions last fall announced that it would “exit” its role as the Lot 2 vendor for the ESN, and a deal formalizing the separation from the ESN project was signed in December. Under that agreement, Motorola Solutions will continue to provide “termination-assistance services” for ESN until December of this year.

This circumstance means that the Home Office will need to select a new Lot 2 vendor, as Home Office officials outlined during their Dec. 15 CMA hearing—the final Home Office hearing before the CMA issues its final decision later this month about whether proposed price controls on Airwave services should become effective.

“The Home Office told us that it had started the process to replace Motorola in ESN, and it hoped to complete it by the first quarter of 2024,” according to a CMA summary of the hearing that was released last Friday. “The intention was to deliver the rollout of ESN by 2029, when the proposed charge control would come to an end.”

At the British Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (BAPCO), ESN Programme Director John Black today confirmed that the Home Office hopes to have a new Lot 2 contractor—likely a consortium of companies—in place during the first half of 2024.

But Black declined to provide an end date for the ESN rollout, noting that any such estimated timeline would be subject to a “massive number of caveats” that BAPCO attendees likely would forget.

“I’m not going to do that [provide an estimated completion date for the ESN],” Black said during his BAPCO keynote today.

Black did provide some notable updates on the progress of the ESN buildout, noting that commercial carrier EE has activated all but 6 of its almost 700 towers for the UK public-safety broadband network. In addition, most of the 292 rural ESN sites that are being built by the Home Office have been constructed.

All of these rural sites probably will be operational by the end of 2024, which would be “well before we start delivering [ESN services to UK first responders],” Black said.

Given that officials for both the Home Office and Motorola Solutions agree that it will take more than two years to transition all UK public-safety agencies from Airwave to ESN communications, this timeline would indicate that the UK government would require Airwave services beyond the current end date of the TETRA at the end of 2026.

Indeed, the CMA’s provisional decision that was released last fall calls for Airwave price controls to remain effective through 2029. In various CMA filings, both the Home Office and Motorola Solutions have indicated that there are questions whether the ESN will be ready to replace Airwave even by this 2029 target date.

The CMA is scheduled to release the final decision from its investigation of Motorola Solutions’ work as the owner and supplier of the Airwave system, which the vendor giant purchased in early 2016. Claiming that Motorola Solutions has used its market dominance to realize “supernormal” profits from Airwave, the CMA has proposed implementing price controls that would cost Motorola Solutions about $1 billion in projected revenues during the next four years.

But Motorola Solutions notes that the underlying problem with the UK public-safety communications market is not the pricing of the Airwave TETRA system but the failure of the UK Home Office to deliver the ESN, which was supposed to replace Airwave at the end of 2019.

Motorola Solutions has asked to CMA to abandon its plan to impose Airwave price controls and have Motorola Solutions asked the United Kingdom (UK) competition regulator to abandon proposed price-control measures on the Airwave TETRA network that serves UK public-safety agencies, instead calling for the UK government to replace the ESN via a “technology-neutral” procurement.

Ildefonso de la Cruz Morales, principal analyst for critical communication at Omdia, contributed reporting from the BAPCO event to this article. Like IWCE’s Urgent Communications, Omdia is an Informa Tech property.