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An essential investment F
Norway’s TETRA public safety network may be one of the last large ones to be built in western Europe, but it has some unique features. Richard Lambley reports from Oslo
or a start, it’s important for you, as a foreigner, to understand that you are now in a country with 324000 square kilometres and a population a little below
five million”, begins Tor Helge Lyngstøl. “Tat makes the implementation of a nationwide radio network quite a huge investment per capita. “So I think this is one of the main reasons why it has taken
some time in Norway.” Mr Lyngstøl is the director of DNK, the Norwegian
Government’s directorate for emergency communications, where he is responsible for a large TETRA project now entering its main deployment phase. It’s a national roll-out which will put in place up to 2000 base stations nationwide by 2015, bringing a shared digital radio communications platform to 40000 or more users in the emergency services and numerous other bodies. It will be Norway’s biggest ever investment in public protection. “One might say that we are not completely out of money in
Norway”, Mr Lyngstøl continues, delicately. “But we are talking about a life-cycle cost of about 10 billion NOK here. Te state budget in Norway for 2012 just passed 1000 billion NOK. “In the investment phase that we are in now, the investment cost – when you include the internal cost to the State – will
Issue 5 2011 TE TRA TODAY
be approximately six billion NOK, and that is more than $1 billion. It is quite a huge investment.” Norway’s Nødnett (‘Emergency Network’) project began
with a pilot system serving just the Oslo region – a small area which nonetheless is home to 30 per cent of Norway’s population. Tis pilot became the subject of exhaustive official reviews and evaluations. But with an ambitious programme so very visible on the state budget, it is perhaps no surprise that a three-year delay ensued before Parliament finally gave the go-ahead for nationwide deployment. However, a few weeks after that decision was made, Norway
was shaken by the horrific events of July 22, 2011 – a terrorist car bomb explosion outside the offices of the Prime Minister, killing eight people and wounding others, followed by a gunman’s attack on an island summer camp, in which 69 lives were taken. Tese shocking disturbances to an otherwise peaceable society shifted public opinion by underlining the need to equip the emergency agencies with the ability to deliver a fast and efficient response. “It became very clear that Nødnett will contribute to a safer
society for all”, comments Mr Lyngstøl. “Tis is of course a thing you can say in speeches – but we experienced this, and this is important.”
Top: ambulances attend an incident. In Norway, dedicated emergency telephone numbers for the individual responder services connect to numerous independent control rooms – an arrangement that led to some headaches for network planners
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