operations One of the things that eats up capacity on a TETRA
network is where people drag their talk groups on to a site, so that you end up with – for example – police from Manchester providing mutual aid [reinforcement] to the Metropolitan Police [the main London police force]. Tey come down to London to provide help – but what
they actually do is sit and listen to their home talk groups, so they can understand what’s going on at home! But they are taking capacity away from the Met, because they are listening to Manchester talk groups in London. So we had to put in place what we call a valid site profile,
which restricts the use of the base station to the specific talk groups a customer wants to use on it. It effectively stops police from Manchester in London listening to Manchester talk groups. We have to manage the use of it because there is a finite capacity out there. If the talk groups are being used ineffectively, then of course it eats into capacity. Te other thing we did was we put additional engineers
on the ground in London in case of problems, to fix faults on base stations. But I’m glad to say we didn’t have any of those. So our additional engineering resource was there and available, but it wasn’t actually used to go out and fix anything, because nothing broke.
Peak allowance In terms of capacity, the way we configure the network is we look at the average usage and then we put an allowance over the top of that to deal with unexpected peaks. We’ve also put in some additional capacity for the Olympics [the London 2012 Games]. So we have additional capacity in the network right now because of the Olympics, and we didn’t suffer any capacity issues at all during the unrest. As well as the additional resource we put in place to
monitor the network, as well as the parameter change team, as well as the additional field engineering support, we did do some other things which are perhaps worthy of note. We stopped all planned work on the network. Obviously
we have to do upgrades, we have to go and swap out faulty equipment and things like that, but we stopped all of that during the period of the unrest. So there was no disruption to the network for any adds, moves or changes. And we held a series of daily conference calls with our
customers, at two o’clock every afternoon, to ensure that they were up to date with the status of the network, to take any intelligence that they might be able to provide us with as to where unrest was. We also sent out, on an hourly basis during the evenings, the status of the network so that our customers would know if there was a site down that might impact their ability to respond.
Making bridges And the final thing we did was, every night at five o’clock, we opened up a conference bridge so that customers could immediately get in contact with us, in the event that they felt that they needed our assistance or they had any intelligence to pass to us. Te conference bridge: we were on it, all our customers are on it, the key agencies – the Department of Health, Department of Communities and Local Government – all have got immediate access to us so that they can raise any issues. Typically our customers have been very happy with what
we provided. Tey’ve made good comments about the level of support, our level of proactiveness and the fact that we just
Issue 4 2011 TE TRA TODAY
During four days of serious disturbances in England, engineers and operators kept a close watch on the Airwave TETRA network as extra resources were brought in
got on and threw the resource in. It’s quite pleasing to see that we can have major unplanned event like this and no issues reported by our customers, just thanks.
Lessons learned I think you learn every time from something like this. Our lessons-learned process is under way. We’ve circulated documents out to our customers to get their feedback on things that we might have done differently, and we are also going to be sharing with them some suggestions on things that they might have done differently. It’s a bit early for me to comment – but one of the things
that we might have done differently, I guess, is more active management. We aggressively managed talk group usage, but I think there’s something to be done about customer education so that they understand the impact (sorry to keep repeating the example!) of Manchester policemen listening to a Manchester talk group in London. So we’ve learned a couple of things and we are going
around doing the activity at the moment so that we pick up all the lessons from it.
nOn the Airwave network, it was soon back to business as usual everywhere. But Mr Benké added that Airwave was continuing to offer the Metropolitan Police an enhanced level of support in preparation for the coming Notting Hill Carnival weekend in West London. Tis annual event is Europe’s largest multicultural street festival.
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