operations
Double minutes
Photo: Ray Tang/Rex Features
Riots and looting in several English cities during August placed heavy demands on Airwave, the national TETRA network for the emergency
services.Martin Benké, network services director, explained to Richard Lambley how the emergency was handled
August 8, 2011: the House of Reeves
furniture store blazes after being torched
by rioters in Croydon, south London
I
n our service centre we have, on the wall, TV channels showing Sky News and BBC News, so we were across [the disturbances] very quickly.
As soon as we spotted that something was kicking off ,
the fi rst thing that we did was we got on the phone to our customers and asked them if there was anything we could do to help. And we started to monitor proactively, and give an additional look at sites in the aff ected areas. We saw the traffi c on the network starting to build up and we saw additional usage, predominantly by the police. T e real growth in traffi c didn’t start to occur until Tuesday,
August 9, which was the day after the Croydon fi re [when a furniture showroom was burned down by rioters]. David Cameron [Prime Minister] got up and talked about putting 16 000 police on the streets of London. T at’s when we noticed a real surge in capacity.
London voice calls London call minutes
Metropolitan Police total minutes
Aug 2, 2011 Aug 9, 2011 Increase 2 002 555
3 947 216 446 617 371 772 946 986 836 174 1 944 661 500 369 464 402
“As you can see”, says Martin Benké, of TETRA operator Airwave Solutions, “the two million calls on our London switch became four million and call minutes more than
doubled from 450 000 to 950 000. And of that 500 000 increase in call minutes, more than 460 000 came from Met Police users”
10 We’ve done a comparison between what the network
looked like on Tuesday August 2 and what the network was like on Tuesday August 9, when it was clear that there were going to be lots more police on the streets. Fundamentally, the network was twice as busy as it was
the previous Tuesday. So on August 2 we carried about two million calls on our London switch and on August 9 that number became four million calls. Call minutes also doubled – more than doubled, in fact.
T ey went up from 450 000 on August 2 to 950 000 on August 9. And of that 500 000 increase – we’ve done the analysis – we can clearly see that the vast majority, 470 000 of those, came from police users. A signifi cant increase. T ere were many additional police users on the streets
causing many additional call minutes. It doubled the usage of the network, eff ectively.
Dynamic changes Once we’d studied the problems, we started to put in place additional resource – extra people looking at the network, extra people available 24 hours a day to do dynamic changes to the network. We put additional resource in to monitor the [radio] sites
more closely than we would do normally, particularly in the areas of high usage. And we then put in place what we call our parameter change team – these are the people who are responsible for the actual confi guration of the network – and they were making dynamic changes to the network to ensure that capacity was managed carefully.
TE TRA TODAY Issue 4 2011
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