The £2.9 Billion Blunder That YOU Are Paying For!

Airwave Is Not Coming Up With The Goods

That We Have Been Led To Believe It Would

We’ve all been told what a wonderful new service Airwave will provide. Not only the public, but the police too, have been sold glowing stories of easy communication between forces across the country, of fast and effective transmission of data and pictures - all that you’d expect of a 21st Century communications system.

Well, it ain’t true. Not unless we pay a great deal more than the £2.9 Billion that the Government has already committed to and accept twice as many masts as originally planned.

AND THAT’S OFFICIAL.

Information sources quoted in the latest news include:

The Home Office

PITO (Police Information Technology Organisation)
A secret Police Authority Report

The professional magazine ‘Computing’, on 16th June, unleashed the bombshell that Airwave is not delivering the service everyone has been expecting it to deliver.

This article includes facts like:
Insiders claim that the number of radio masts need to double from 3,000 to 6,000, and that police will have to replace many existing handsets because changes in technology have rendered them obsolete.
Data transmission speeds currently vary between 3.2kbps [kilo-bits per second] and 7.2kps - far short of the 28.8kbs promised, restricting the use of planned functions such as accessing pictures and fingerprints.
Standard GSM mobile phones use 9.6kbps, with multiples of this on the now-common GPRS phones!!

A follow-up article the next day includes:

"We have it working so that we send a roughly recognisable passport-sized picture, but it is very slow," said one technician.
But an expert on police radio systems added: "The current technology cannot handle pictures or video. In fact, I do not think it ever will."

A more in-depth analysis in the same magazine (not included in link below) includes:

‘In some areas Airwave is still struggling to provide communications between forces.

"We're working on different software issues at the moment. We can't talk to police in Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire" said one officer in Suffolk.‘

Great! Isn’t inter-operability what Airwave was supposed to be all about??

The conclusion of a 3-month investigation, as reported by The Times, 17th June, is that:

“A £2.9 BILLION police radio network designed to allow the emergency services to stay in touch is not working properly”

The Mail on Sunday, 20 June , reports that the planned new police communications system “is turning into a multi-billion pound white elephant thanks to a Government blunder”, that “The Home Office admitted that forces were already having to supplement the network with other equipment”, and that “far from allowing rapid downloading of data, Airwave is operating at less than a quarter of the speed of computer modems ten years ago”.

“12 seconds or more to download a passport size picture to one of the few terminals equipped to receive them, according to PITO”.

Much has been made of Airwave’s technological improvements over the old police radio system. We’re also told that the previous system was 30 to 50 years old (depending on which police spokesperson you hear it from). Just think for a moment of all the ’technological improvements’ we’ve seen in our homes and lives over those 30 years: many generations of home computers, from the first ZX80, via the BBC computer to the pentium PC; CDs and CD players (Remember the old ’record player’ and vinyl records?); the Internet; Satellite TV; and, yes, mobile phones (now carried by around 85% of all UK residents).

Wouldn’t it be almost impossible NOT to produce a vastly-improved communications system for our emergency services?? The services expected from (but apparently NOT delivered by) Airwave are the VERY LEAST that one might anticipate in this day and age.

Virtually every home is better equipped than our police force - and still will be, if the police have Airwave. The real disgrace is that the technology for the blue-light services has been allowed to fall so far behind what we have all got used to in our homes and offices.

“This is better than what you had 30 (or 50) years ago” is hardly a cause for celebration!!

Let’s see our emergency services PROPERLY EQUIPPED - NOT stuck with Airwave.

To see the full text of the above articles, and more, click on this link to the TetraWatch website.