ESN sees ‘good progress’ but challenges remain in the UK, director says

Most of the network infrastructure for the Emergency Services Network (ESN)—the public-safety LTE system being built throughout the United Kingdom (UK)—is complete, but it is unclear when UK first responders will use the new system in their day-to-day operations, according to ESN Programme Director John Black.

Speaking at the British APCO (BAPCO) event earlier this month, Black noted that there has been some “really good progress” in several areas of the system, but his speech provided little guidance about the timeline for the project.

ESN has been criticized for being billions of dollars over budget and well behind the original schedule. The UK public-safety LTE system was supposed to be finished by the end of 2019, when UK public-safety personnel were supposed to finish transitioning their mission-critical voice communications to the ESN, so the nationwide Airwave TETRA network could be shut down. Instead, the most recent goal is to make the transition happen by the end of 2026—seven years behind the original schedule.

But Black said that the UK Home Office is focused on completing the ESN and ensuring it addresses the needs of public safety, not on timetables and budgetary concerns.

“The first thing to say is that the overriding priority here is officer safety. Whatever else we do, there’s an absolute red line around [officer safety],” Black said during his BAPCO keynote, a recording of which was provided to IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “Before this goes live, before we ask the emergency services to accept it, we will test it to a level that we are confident that officers will be safe in using it. And we will engage users in that testing, in both in our operational-validation and operational-evaluation phase of the program.

“This program is not primarily driven by dates or finances or anything. It’s driven primarily about getting the right solution, but making sure that it’s operationally safe before we put it live. So, proving all of the functions we need and testing that is really, really important to us.”

To make the mission-critical-voice transition a reality, the ESN needs to support push-to-talk (PTT) communications over the public-safety LTE system. The ESN currently going into production with version 11 of the Kodiak PTT solution owned by Motorola Solutions that will be used in the ESN Beta phase of testing, Black said.

“Later this year, we should be able to upgrade our handsets, so they can use ESN Beta and some of the additional features that we see there, which include video streaming, better coverage, private telephony and status messaging,” Black said, noting that the video streaming capability “works really well” in the tests that he has seen.

Kodiak 12—the version of the PTT solution that is expected to fully operational on the ESN system—is scheduled to arrive in the UK next month, according to Black.

“That currently is working well,” he said. “The challenge now is kind of at the tail of the requirements, the gaps we need to plug, and in particular, the things we learn in the detail that are really, really important for operator safety—the functions we just have to have—and getting all of those scheduled and built into the Kodiak [platform].”

Black noted some encouraging milestones in the buildout of the ESN network. EE—the cellular-carrier partner for the ESN project—has finished its work on more than 19,000 cell towers, which are known as “masts” in the UK.

“Nearly all of those—97%–have been upgraded, so they’re fully ESN-capable, implementing 3GPP standards. You can use a Direct 2 devices [Direct 2 is a precursor test to ESN Beta] practically anywhere in the country on the EE network now,” Black said.

EE also has complete 85% of the additional 767 towers that are designed to improve coverage for first responders—a priority for the ESN project, Black said.

“There is a huge amount of work here, and it’s obviously a huge area of concern from our users, because coverage is everything,” Black said. “The best radio system, the best push-to-talk system and the best data service in the world is worth nothing, if you can’t actually access it.”

Less encouraging is the progress that has been made with so-called Extended Area Services (EAS) cell towers that are designed to provide ESN coverage in rural and remote areas. Of the 292 planned EAS cell sites, less than half—144—have been built, and only 11 have been activated to date, although Black noted that the Home Office is in the process of selecting a contractor to accelerate the site-activation process.

Black said that the Home Office has altered its perspective on ESN devices, noting that “we can absolutely see that this is not a one-size-fits-all market,” so multiple types of devices are needed.

“I think our thinking on handheld devices has matured quite a bit over the last couple of years, as to how best to manage and handle the handheld requirement, because it is the major requirement,” Black said. “There is a range of requirements we’re working on, and our thinking is moving away from ‘This is the ESN device’ toward ‘This is what the ESN ecosystem for devices is going to be like.’ There will be a range of devices.

“We see, I think, a hybrid world where the programme will source several basic devices, but we will also provide a structure where other organizations can source devices directly, and we can provide the certification mechanism for them, so it can be proven that it will work successfully on the network.”

Frontline officers will need rugged devices that are expected to be more expensive that a typical commercial mobile phone, while other public-safety personnel may be able to utilize devices that are not as ruggedized and should approach commercial handset prices, Black said.

Home Office officials “see a requirements for some form of device-to-device communication” in the device used by frontline responders, Black said. However, Black did not specify how the Home Office plans to deliver this direct-mode functionality—considered by many industry sources to be one of the biggest challenges in the effort to deliver PTT over broadband in a manner that mirrors LMR performance.

Black also emphasized the need for effective interworking between the Airwave and ESN networks, as both systems are expected to be operational simultaneously during as first responders transition from TETRA to LTE.

“The basic vision here is, if I’ve got one officer on one side of the street with an ESN handheld, and an officer with Airwave on the other side of the street, then they need to talk to each other,” Black said. “The fact that they are on different networks with different technologies should be irrelevant and invisible to them. That’s why interconnection is so important.

“Currently, the projections are that the period of time that we need for the transition is two to three years, from the start of mass transition to the finish. During that interworking and interconnection between the systems is absolutely vital.”