The National Audit Office has today published an assessment of the progress being made by the UK Government’s 4G based Emergency Services Network (ESN), which finds that it continues to be massively over budget and has “fallen further behind schedule“. In fact, not even the Home Office knows when it’ll be ready, but 2029 or later is hinted.
In case anybody has forgotten, the emergency services (police, fire etc.) were supposed to have moved away from the old Motorola-owned Airwave network by now, which harnessed TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio) network technology. But TETRA is slow (dialup / ISDN like data speeds) and expensive, although it does deliver strong voice coverage (c.97% geographic reach).
The high cost of Airwave is often highlighted as one of the main reasons why the UK government, in 2015, decided to replace it with a 4G alternative (ESN) – the first country to do so. The Home Office originally expected that emergency services could start using the ESN in September 2017, allowing Airwave to be replaced by December 2019, but the contract ended up being billions of pounds over budget and years behind schedule.
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By March 2023 the Home Office is expected to have spent just under £2bn on the ESN, and a further £2.9bn to maintain Airwave because of all the delays. A variety of problems have beset the project, from delays with developing the new end-user kit (handsets etc.), to delays with the network build and competition disputes (e.g. Motorola‘s dual role – purchasing the Airwave network in February 2016, two months after it had already entered into a contract with the Government to provide software for the ESN).
As it stands, Motorola will no-longer work on the ESN after 2023 (i.e. the Home Office agreed to end the contract with Motorola early and pay it £45m after all the competition concerns), while the Home Office “does not currently know when ESN will be ready or how much it will cost“. In fact, the Home Office does not even expect to use the critical software or systems that it tasked Motorola with developing.
The work to provide users with full network coverage is also “progressing more slowly than expected” in 2019. Although the Home Office considers that it can predict where coverage is incomplete, this has not been fully tested. EE has nearly completed its work to establish the main network, but the Home Office must still obtain planning permission for work on 42 of the 292 remote area sites. The Home Office no longer has a contract to provide handsets for the ESN either, and the handsets it had procured “will not be supported after 2023“.
According to the NAO (here), the Home Office currently plans to award EE a new contract, “without competition“, for the network rollout side to avoid delaying the programme further, which it intends to recompete when the new contract ends. On top of that they also need to award a new contract to replace Motorola’s role in the programme, which will be their third attempt to introduce this technology.
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Individual police forces will make their own decision about when to stop using Airwave and move to ESN. But the Home Office is currently developing a new business case for approval in 2024, which will set out a revised timetable and costing, alongside a strategic case for continuing the programme. This will take account of any charge control on Airwave that the competition authority (CMA) may soon propose (such a control could save taxpayers more than £150 million a year).
Overall, the timetable for completion of the ESN has been pushed back to 2026 “at the earliest” and is still uncertain (the Home Office recently indicated to the CMA that it could be 2029 or later). Meanwhile, maintaining Airwave into the 2030s could cost at least £250 million a year.
Gareth Davies, Head of the NAO, said:
“After eight years and almost £2 billion, it is extremely worrying that the Home Office does not now know when the Emergency Services Network will be ready or what it will cost.
Home Office is in the process of letting new contracts to put the programme on a sounder footing. It must now also put in place a realistic timetable and robust contractual and governance arrangements to address the significant risks this programme still faces and avoid any further waste of taxpayers’ money.”
In case anybody has forgotten, the ESN was originally intended to save taxpayers money and improve communications for the emergency services. Didn’t that turn out well.
The ESN concept of utilising a single transmission means supplied by one Mobile Network Operator is fatally flawed.
What is required is a ROBUST Mission Critical system which utilises MULTIPLE bearer networks – so that in the case of a single network failing there are fall back modes of communication.
I find it hard to see how the Home Office can get away with paying a commercial company to improve their network coverage without offering a similar arrangement to the other networks. Is this not anti-competitive?
AND – paying £2.9 BILLION to keep the antiquated Airwave Tetra system in operation? There is absolutely NO WAY that the real cost of extending the life of the system can cost that much. Somebody is extracting criminally large amounts of cash from the taxpayers in return for delivering very little. Building the original Airwave system cost considerably leass that that!
All sounds pretty normal for public sector procurement. Zero transparency, flawed planning, poor decision making. It is fashionable to blame civil servants, but all executive decisions no matter how minor have to be passed right up the chain for ministers to either make or approve as a recommendation. In the case of the Home Office ministers it’s been a comedy of mediocrity for well over a decade now, all of them embroiled in various scandals and shambles. What would Priti Patel have understood of any of the strategic, technical or commercial decisions that needed making? Less than my cat. The endless Westminster political circus would have acted to further delay decisions as ministers jockey for position in the parliamentary Conservative party. And once something runs out of time (ie an old contract has been agreed to end but the replacement system doesn’t exit or doesn’t work) then the supplier can and does name their own price. You can be sure that all the companies involved were generous in their lobbying of ministers.
Wouldn’t it of been cheaper to force the operators to give national roaming and network priority to emergency services and also allow masts to be built to cover the notspots.
It was madness giving it all to EE.
Home Office Awarded the contract to the network with the least low-band capacity deployed (just 5MHz paired on Band20) and therefore the worst coverage, especially bad considering their subscriber numbers.
Hoped that Band28(700MHz) auction would help EE, but they haven’t rolled this out past a couple of trial sites according to cellmapper, likely due to the panels on most (probably all) their existing sites not supporting anything lower than Band20(800MHz). Surprisingly Three network have been busy rolling out Band28 almost nationwide over the last 18 moths, since they have the advantage of installing new monopoles with new antennas supporting this band.
Vodafone doing some really good stuff on low-band also, reframing more Band8(900MHz) to 4G, as part of their 3G shutdown, creating 10MHz paired 4G here alongside existing 10MHz paired 4G on Band20(800MHz) for a total of 20MHz paired low-band. No no antennas required and sometimes just a software update to existing radios.
And then even O2 (existing AirWave contract) are deploying tri-band 700/800/900MHz on their orion poles. Bit slow roll out but theoretically will give them the “best indoor Mbps” at some point in future.
EE have been really out Band 28 on 5G only, that’s why it’s not showing on cellmapper.
4G network which won’t be complete until 2029 – at which point 4G will be obsolete. Hence they’ll still end up paying for their own private network anyway.
What a great project!
Obviously this deal was made before any 5G rollout, but 5G Network Slicing would be a perfect solution for this, the networks build their standard 5G network while also maximising land coverage and give the emergency services their own dedicated network slice that by design can still be up and fully working even if the other consumer/general public slices are having capacity issues, also would have the added benefit of giving better land coverage for the general public too