Will Tetra help police with their enquiries?

In May it was revealed that some police in the UK are furious that the Home Office is forcing them to adopt terrestrial trunked radio (Tetra). Now it's becoming clear that the Home Office was blinded by the glowing endorsements of industry experts, and adopted Tetra without question. It awarded an exclusive £2.5bn contract to BT, Motorola and TRW to build the Public Safety Radio Communications Project (PSRCP), which is based on Tetra, by 2004.

Governments, industry experts and scientists worked together since the late 1980s to develop a uniform technology for emergency and public networks, using Tetra frequencies. The technology that resulted from their joint effort had such a high reputation among network specialists that it became close to untouchable - few dared to question the expertise of its creators.

Anticipating Tetra's voice and data functionality, the Home Office was so convinced of its potential that it sold off its existing police frequencies to be part of the recent £20bn third generation mobile licence bids.

Uncertain future
The Home Office could be getting more than it bargained for. Forces up and down the country have reacted angrily to the cost of £2.5bn, which the UK government insists must come out of police budgets. Analysts are also proclaiming that Tetra will be comparatively slow, and may be out of date by the time the project is rolled out.

Nigel Deighton, research director at Gartner, says the current applications of Tetra technology provide advanced voice services, but cannot compete with the package data service that most police forces are using.

"Tetra is a new technology and has not reached its full evolution yet," says Deighton. "Package data services, as currently provided by competitors Ram, Vodafone and Cognito, are not supported yet, and it is uncertain when this will happen."

The police need these developments to provide the sort of services they expect from their next generation phone network, including the ability to send graphics files of criminals to police cars.

"One can question Tetra's future," says Deighton. "The roll out of PSRCP will take about five years. By then, Tetra probably will support package data service, but at that point UMTS [Universal Mobile Telecommunications System] technology will have become a well-established reality and offer better functionality at higher speed."

Brian Oliver, chairman of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) for the Tetra project, confirmed that data services are not defined under the standard yet, but he predicts that this will be completed by the end of this year. "The standard is complex, comes in many parts and goes through a lengthy European approval cycle," he says.

"It takes a year before any new part in the Tetra standard can be published. From there, it is up to the manufacturers to make it operational. They can choose which parts of the standard to implement and what to leave out."

Slower transmissions
Motorola is one of the manufacturers of the PSCRP network. Hans Jorn Nielsen, business development manager of Tetra data applications at Motorola, says the phone giant plans to release its first Tetra application next September. He confirmed, however, that this would be a slower method of data transmission than the police's current package data service. "The release of higher speed and more functionality is the next phase. It may happen next year, but we cannot fix on a date," he says.

While analysts question the functionality and future of Tetra, senior police officers are concerned about how they will pay for the project. Ian Harrison, chief inspector at London City police communications unit, says that, given the choice, he would not be making plans to change to Tetra technology by 2003. "The move over to Tetra was really prompted by the Home Office's removal of the current police radio frequencies by 2005," he says.

"Our financial budget has already shrunk over the past two years and we are really worried about paying the estimated £1.25m per year that it will cost. The old system was much cheaper," he claims.

Fewer bobbies on the beat?
Spending extra money on the radio network could lead to fewer policemen on UK roads. Paul Friday, head of IS for West Yorkshire Police, argues that the cost of PSRCP is equivalent to losing 450 officers during rollout, or an average of 210 officers over the duration of the contract. "With no additional funding, the only way many forces can pay for it is by reducing the number of police officers," he says.

Ram Mobile Data currently provides the package data service for about half the country's police forces. Adrian Noad, director of marketing and system development at Ram, says: "The government didn't consider other possibilities. It could simply complete current data service with voice services from other suppliers; that would be cheaper and quicker. Tetra seems a high price to pay for conforming to the European standard."

Terry Hamer, project manager of PSRCP at the Police Information Technology Organisation of the Home Office, declined to comment on the data capability of the network he is installing.