UK looks to France for ideas to complete LTE-based ESN for first responders

After spending most of the past decade as the European leader in pursuit of public-safety broadband communications, United Kingdom (UK) officials hope new initiatives in France and elsewhere can help inform a better approach that will allow the much-delayed Emergency Services Network (ESN) to be completed.

Simon Ricketts, chair of the UK Home Office Independent Technical Assurance Panel, told members of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) that UK representatives recently visited France, which hopes to build its Réseau Radio du Futur (RRF, or Radio Network of the Future) in key locations to support public-safety broadband communications during the 2024 Olympics in Paris.

Ricketts said he initially thought this aggressive timetable in France “feels a little edgy, to say the least,” but he also noted that “the French have quite a reputation in delivering technology projects … and they usually get it right to time.”

With this in mind, UK officials with the ESN program spoke with RRF vendors that were announced last October, including Capgemini—the prime RRF contractor, in cooperation with Airbus—and mission-critical-push-to-talk (MCPTT) supplier Streamwide, according to Ricketts. Some “building at scale” for the RRF already has been completed, he said.

“The crucial point is that I do believe that—around the Olympics—we will be seeing a working solution, standards-based, with some form of push-to-talk app,” Ricketts said during the PAC hearing conducted last Wednesday, April 26.

This Airbus-Streamwide MCPTT solution was subjected to extensive operability and interoperability testing during the pan-European BroadWay project that concluded last September.

While the prospect of a broadband push-to-talk service meeting the needs of French public safety is encouraging, the fact that it would not be done first in the UK—a country that planned to begin transitioning from TETRA to the LTE-based ESN in 2016—offers internal concerns, PAC Chair Meg Hillier said. Current Home Office projections call for the transition from the Airwave TETRA network owned by Motorola Solutions to the ESN to be completed by 2030.

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

Ricketts said France has a considerable advantage by starting at this time, because the public-safety LTE market has matured significantly since the UK Home Office began its efforts to build a broadband network that would support mission-critical voice communications. Key standards supporting key features like ambient listening, discreet listening, prioritization and preemption have been finalized for year, and vendors have offerings in the marketplace, he said.

“The app providers have been looking at this for a while now,” Ricketts said. “There is more than one alternative app. They are a little immature, but the French are on that. So, I think that we will see enough evidence in France.”

Multiple PAC members questioned whether the oft-delayed and over-budget ESN still should be pursued. Ricketts said he believes it is the best option in the future and noted that the Home Office has a “golden opportunity” to “stress test” the ESN network before completely severing ties with Motorola Solutions at the end of the year.

“That sort of evidence—also watching what France and the Dutch are doing—is important,” Ricketts said. “There is no doubt whatever that the international community is now moving in a broadband direction—cautiously.”

When the UK embarked on its public-safety broadband quest, the LTE technology needed was “just premature and not feasible,” Ricketts said. Today, the public-safety LTE technology “is now credible,” he said—an assertion supported by a widespread movement toward public-safety broadband communications throughout the world.

“We did an international review of seven other European countries, and the [United] States and Korea, and concluded that everyone is now starting to move in this general broadband direction,” Ricketts said. “They would, I think, rightly describe that they watched and learned while the UK almost certainly went prematurely.”

For UK public-safety agencies, the multiple changes in the projected date to transition from the Airwave TETRA network to the ESN—from 2019 to 2022 to 2026 and, most recently, to the end of the decade—has created significant budgeting and procurement challenges, public-safety representatives told the PAC.

Uncertainty about when—or if—the transition from TETRA to LTE will happen makes it difficult for agencies to make device-purchasing that represent the most efficient use of taxpayers’ money, said Chris Lucas, senior user with the NHS Ambulance Radio Programme, which is funded by the national Department of Health and Social Care.

“Our handheld terminal fleets are aged—I think that is the polite way of putting it—and we have to replace them,” Lucas said during the PAC hearing. “Now, it [ESN transition uncertainty] puts us in a quandary. Do we replace them in the short term and then have to replace them again with increased costs?”

Lucas said he is encouraged by the prospect of using dual-mode handsets that can operate on either the TETRA network or ESN in the future, but he said budgetary issues remain as users await the TETRA-to-LTE transition.

“The biggest cost for us is that we are still dual paying,” Lucas said. “The Department of Health and Social Care is contributing towards ESN. It is a core funder—about 10% of the core funding—but we are also paying for Airwave as well, so we are almost paying double. How long is that going to go on for? That is where the cost pressure is for us.”

Chief Constable Kier Pritchard, the ESN for the National Police Chiefs’ Council, echoed this concern for local law-enforcement agencies, noting that the delays between 2018 and 2022 resulted in 175,000 Airwave devices being purchased at a cost of 122.5 million pounds ($152.75 million).

“Our predictions from 2023 until the first Airwave shutdown at the end of ’26 is another 37,000 Airwave devices, and that is a cost of £25.9 million—so, they are significant,” Pritchard said during the PAC hearing.

“There is normally a 10-year life cycle on those, with one battery replacement. We need to be confident [about the timing of the ESN transition]. On those radios that we purchased in 2018, for instance, which will become obsolete in 10 years’ time prior to [the projected Airwave] shutdown, is there a replacement cost for those that will be required?”

Pritchard said he understands the potential benefit of agencies buying dual-mode devices that can operate on both a TETRA and LTE network, but he said such technology is not a practical option at this time.

“It makes great business sense to ensure that you procure the right device once, and you can then use it through transition, but we have not yet seen an affordable price that will enable us to do that, so we’re having to purchase new ‘old’ technology, which is a concern,” Pritchard said.

“Suddenly, when we get to the position where we are then needing to purchase new ESN devices, there will be dual costs starting to unfold. We are incredibly concerned about the affordability of that and would like to

have a conversation … to look at transition costs as a non-core grant to policing, either to support transition or to pay for the Airwave devices at the time we are buying ESN devices.”

Meanwhile, UK police agencies are using broadband services offered by cellular carriers to support bandwidth-intensive applications, Pritchard said. Convincing these agencies to abandon those business relationship could be challenging when the time comes to switch to the ESN, particularly if ESN is expensive at the time, he said.

“What ESN will give us in the future—so long as it is affordable, and that is a really important point—is the ability to do that on a priority and pre-emption basis across the emergency services, where for instance, at the scene of a

major, live incident, we may be able to share live footage across the emergency services,” Pritchard said. “It has operational benefits, but it must be at a price that can be afforded.

“At the moment, we are concerned around the affordability of the ESN versus the in-house solutions that we’ve

procured.”

Ricketts outlined some potential challenges to the projection that Airwave would continue to meet the mission-critical-voice needs of UK first responders through this decade and possibly a few years into the 2030s.

Matthew Rycroft, permanent home secretary at the Home Office, told PAC members during a March 27 hearing that industry experts believe TETRA could begin becoming “obsolete” technology between 2030 and 2035, undermining the importance for the UK government to complete the ESN, so public-safety agencies could switch to the broadband system.

In addition to technical obsolescence, Ricketts said there likely will infrastructure issues associated with the 4,000 Airwave towers in the country as the infrastructure continues to be used beyond its initial expected life, noting that “I don’t think that those costs have necessarily been taken into consideration.”

Finally, Ricketts expressed a concern that increasingly is being cited in conjunction with many LMR projects: a lack of skilled workers capable of maintaining and upgrading the Airwave TETRA system.

“I think the third area of worry is where skills start to become in shorter supply,” Ricketts said. “That’s where other European nations have left TETRA, so the number of people in the field working on it and the number of people upgrading the operating systems becomes less.

“The final thing is a risk that we have not discussed. Once ESN is successful and a cutover date looms, there’s obviously a concern that—in the last 18 months to two years—the individuals working for Airwave Solutions Ltd. … are suddenly looking at a situation where they wonder what they are going to do next. Watching staff turnover in Airwave is going to be critically important.”