control rooms
It’s important to be able to have user-interfaces that are customizable to meet these roles, not to have a rigid one-size- fits-all.” A good example of this can be found in the control room
of the Swedish Police Force. Simon explains: “Tey don’t have touch screens – their unions say they’re not allowed because of repetitive strain injury, believe it or not – and they have three 27-inch monitors in front of them. Teir apps all run off one PC: competitor’s apps, partner’s apps, all morphed into the environment they want, specific to them. Tey swipe in at their desk and it animates and changes the location of their apps across their screens to their preference. “And that’s what the users want, that’s what they tell
us – access to resources wherever and whenever. When they want to get access to a resource – whether it’s contact history, telephony, TETRA, CCTV – it’s there and it’s there immediately.” Te advent of portable tablets has also had an effect in the
control room environment. Tis gives organizations the ability to have dispatcher level, call-taker level communications wherever it is needed. “It could be the scene of an incident, it could be home workers, it could be en route”, Simon continues. “To be able to have that capability wherever you want is increasingly important.”
The technical perspective Tese changing user requirements have led to a very different set of technical requirements being requested from organizations. Tese include solutions that are virtualized and hosted locally or in a cloud. According to Simon, not many UK police forces are keen on hosting on servers somewhere on the other side of the world, but forces are interested in virtualizing their solutions, hosting them either on-site in a protected secure environment or collaboratively with other forces or agencies. Tere are more requests for solutions that only use
common IT equipment and don’t require specialist ICCS knowledge to maintain. Systems that grow, shrink and morph to meet changing demand are also popular along with solutions which pool and share TETRA with other organizations. Simon explains: “We’ve been able to pool and share TETRA for years now within the customers own organization or collaboratively with other police forces or fire and rescue services. To be able to have the ability to remotely connect to a CCI port in the UK – or a TCS integration – with other organizations 100 miles away from you is now possible and all without any proprietary hardware – it’s a software app.” He also suggests that systems that are bearer agnostic and
future proof are becoming vital. “You know that when LTE comes in or if Airwave [the UK TETRA network provider] changes to use another supplier’s TETRA infrastructure, you can change the low-level driver on the app and replace it with the driver for say Cassidian and it will work in the same way it worked before. It’s not changing the whole system.” A solution that maintains access and control of critical
communications, even when servers and IP networks fail, is crucial. Simon suggests that there has been a more willing acceptance of risk in the UK because of cost saving measures. “Compare it to how things were 10 years ago, then yes, you
Issue 14 2013 TE TRA TODAY
Cortex from APD Communications integrates access to different communications systems into one portal with a consistent look and feel throughout
have to take that view. Look at the architecture then of ICCS systems and say I want it cheaper, I’ll not have a fallback control room, I’ll not have a standby system. Nowadays you don’t need to make these tough decisions – you can still have that level of resilience without having to make that decision to reduce costs because it costs the same with a distributed software ICCS rather than the proprietary centralized ICCS with a traditional hub-and-spoke architecture.”
Changing traditional thinking Te traditional ICCS involves a central hub, which includes proprietary items in it. Tis hub typically mixes, routes and feeds the different audio sources to the workstations that you’ve got in your control room or at mobile locations. Simon argues that this technology mirrors a lot of the
technology found in the telephony switch that most large organizations have already invested heavily in. “Professional telephony solutions have ACD [automatic
call distribution], impressive failover systems, management information, and statistical analysis. Tey have all this capability so why attempt to duplicate and replicate some of that functionality by having a telephony switch that, for all intents and purposes, is inside a traditional ICCS. Why not leverage the capability you’ve already invested in? You don’t have to pay twice and have no added complications.” He describes a more flexible alternative available nowadays
to this traditional ICCS – a software distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture. “It’s a thick client. Te TETRA and the telephony
terminate where possible at the client end, and that client then advertises this connection to other users, other clients, anywhere on the network. And that network can be a WAN, it could be over 3G or satellite, it could be anywhere where you’ve got VPN accessibility to be able to get on to that network and you’ve got enough bandwidth – which isn’t high;
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