norway
Controlling the control rooms
O
ne aspect of the programme which proved unexpectedly time-consuming was that of specifying control rooms for the various agencies. To be supplied by Frequentis, these will range from large centres for the main agencies down to a host of smaller ones in the health service, including local response centres and doctors on call. “That’s taken a lot of attention from us”, says Dagfinn Sjøvik, project manager for Nødnett. “Just clarifying the scope of what is relevant for a big project and what is third-party applications for the end users – where do you draw the line? What’s in the project, what’s outside the project? From the technical point of view, it creates discussions on the interfacing: who is responsible. And that increases risk to the overall project as well, because technically it needs to work. “Technical issues are only half the story of this.
In order to get a good public safety network to work, you also need to work on the operational procedures in the background here – on the control room, on the terminal side. And the more you add of technical solutions in the control room, the more you dig into the operational procedure domain of the end users.
“Say you want to go live with an agency: the
more you add, the more risk you put into it. Then there’s something initially not linked to the main project that keeps you from starting using the whole service. “We also need to respect that the service
we bring in here is a part of a bigger chain of emergency handling of agencies, so what seems to be a clear line for us – this is inside their contract, if you will, and this is outside their contract – if you put on a police hat or an ambulance hat, he doesn’t see the same clear border.”
Managing the Nødnett project, Dagfinn Sjøvik
Nødnett
40 000 radio
terminals
In Step 1: police: 4988 fire: 2857 health: 970 others: 280
operation and maintenance
Agency control rooms: Police: 27 (6 in Step 1) + 3 special units Fire: 24 (5 in Step 1) Health: 23 AMK (3 in Step 1) 89 emergency response centres in hospitals (15 in Step 1) 165 GPOC centres (20 in Step 1)
Following the success of a pilot deployment in the Oslo area (‘Step 1’, shown here in red), the extension of Norway’s Nødnett to national coverage is now beginning. Through a further five construction phases, the network will grow to 1900 base stations or beyond, many of them providing communications in areas of little or no population – including the whole of the long land border with Sweden, Finland and Russia. The system operates in the 380–400MHz band
“I really wonder what multislot data is being used for in
other countries. We discover so many basic things here. And that is a little bit unexpected. When I say basic things, I mean very low throughput. To have, say, decent throughput in a multi-slot area, that seems to be a problem. Te rates that we see are very low – I would say unacceptably low.” “We are looking into why that is”, Dagfinn Sjøvik puts in.
“We haven’t, or the supplier hasn’t, been able to conclude on this. But we expect higher rates than what we’ve seen so far in multi-slot. And it’s yet to be seen on the TEDS carriers. “Of course, it’s also interesting to see how applications
can be used also to roam between TETRA carriers and commercial carriers. I think the users (right now there’s a lot of stuff that is being implemented here), they need to walk before they can run, and I think that’s some of the key experiences from Phase 0, the first roll-out area. “It actually takes quite a while for them to get up and
running on the basic usage, and also basic usage within an agency and across agencies. And then of course on top of that come all the data discussions. So I think it will take quite a while before we and the agencies understand how they will use TEDS in the best possible way.” TEDS is not yet running on the network, but it will be
added during the next contract year as part of the Step 2 deployment, on existing sites in the Oslo area as well as on some of the new sites. “Tere are discussions about where
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