Mobile Spin on Hello Hello Hello

Mobile mayhem. hello… hello… HELLO!

Back in my blog Mobile Mobile Networks – Part 2 I raised some potential issues regarding the emergency services networks migrating from their existing private network to the commercial mobile network. There have been a number of articles in recent weeks that made me think a little more about the potential consequences of this migration.

I have spoken to some colleagues and contacts in the industry and we all share the same concerns that this may be a step too far for our hard pressed emergency services. Taking my fairly simplistic personal view on this alone the consequences could be far reaching. This government has a further commitment to cut public spending. From my own experience way back when I worked for a large organisation this meant the inevitable reduction in the level of experience and expertise through forced early retirement or redundancy for the most experienced and expensive staff.

“…we can absolutely guarantee that there will be no reduction in the demands on their wireless communications”

I realise I am stretching my assumptions but as with many industries it seems feasible that one way of reducing the impact of the loss of this experience in the field is to centralise the experience back by having a team of experienced advisers back at base. Now this is the crunch. For this to be effective in an emergency services environment it needs to be immediate, and therefore, is entirely dependent on reliable and resilient communications. This is nothing more than an educated guess on my part and it is only one small element.

O2 no longer bidding for the emergency services network

The government are some way through the process of selecting companies to run and support the emergency services network within the commercial mobile band. Some companies are bidding for the implementation and others for the network operation. However, I was concerned to read in the BBC News that O2 are no longer bidding to be the network operator leaving EE as the only contender for this element of the bid.

Moving the emergency services onto a commercial 4G network obviously has advantages over a totally private network, provided the network is ready. 4G service around the UK across all providers are hit and miss to say the least. In some parts of the country they are non-existent. Also, during high density peak demand when thousands of people descend into a small area with their smart phones congestion can also render the mobile network unusable. There is much work to be done to provide a national 4G network capable of supporting the emergency services, 2017 is not very far away.

When they were up they were up

Another fairly recent mobile network event was a little closer to home for us. On Bank Holiday Monday our O2 mobile phones lost service. At the time it was very frustrating but fortunately for us, the majority of our staff carry more than one mobile device spanning several networks. According to the reports that came out later the problem was due to a network issue when a problem with the system that allows overseas customers to roam their network impacted on domestic services.

I lost service for around six hours. I was unable to make calls, send texts or use data services. As frustrating as it was my life did not depend on the service. Nor did the lives of any of my colleagues or customers. But what if lives did depend on the network? Move forward a few years when the emergency services network resides on the one of the commercial 4G networks and lives will almost certainly depend on the availability of the network. Having said this, the current private emergency services network has suffered down time in the recent past, as discussed in my ‘Why do resilient networks fail’ blog on 1st May 2015.

So what about the rest of us?

Taking the optimistic view, if the organisation making a successful bid to operate the emergency services network invests in their infrastructure to provide true nationwide 4G to support the emergency services users, it could be good for all of us. It could also be an incentive to other operators to increase their cover across the UK to span rural areas and increase their capacity to cater for high demand. As I mentioned in the Mobile Mobile Networks blog, high demand for the emergency services is almost certainly going to be mirrored for commercial and domestic customers.

In the meantime some government officials have spoken of the need to address mobile ‘not spots’ and this has given rise to a number of operators providing roaming SIMs that can work on any UK providers network. On face value these may seem like a potential option but a word of warning, they are likely to come with restrictions such as 3G only for non-home networks plus increased latency due to data having to traverse third party networks to break out to the internet via their home network. If this ‘home’ network happens to be in another country the latency can be increased considerably.

”Hello? …Hello? …HELLO! Can somebody hear me then?”

Whatever the method used to reduce costs in our emergency services we can absolutely guarantee that there will be no reduction in the demands on their wireless communications and I believe it is safe to assume that wherever the government axe strikes this dependency will increase. My concern is, the stock police greeting from so many TV shows of ‘Hello, hello, hello, what’s going on here then?’ will become ‘Hello? …Hello? …HELLO! Can somebody hear me then?’

Useful links…

BBC News – O2 drop out of ESN bid
BBC News – O2 network outage
BBC News – National roaming SIMs
Astro blog – Mobile Mobile Networks – Part 2
Astro blog – Why do resilient networks fail?