8
News
NAO: ESN to cost an
additional £3.1bn
www.criticalcomms.com June 2019
Malaysia: MAHB
upgrades to Sepura
Malaysia Airports Holding Berhad
(MAHB), the operator of 39 airports
across Malaysia, has upgraded its
TETRA terminals to Sepura’s SC2 series across
its four biggest airports, including
Kuala Lumpur International
Airport (KLIA), following
the initial integration
of a TETRA system
across them in 2012.
MAHB decided
to make the upgrade
to enable further
eciency gains
from the use of data
applications.
e handsets are
being initially rolled out
across the four airports’
customer service teams
(fewer than 100 in total), with
a commitment to roll them out more
widely among the airports’ security teams and
their wider maintenance teams.
Azhari Mohd Taib, senior manager at
Malaysia Airports, said: “We are very pleased
with the SC21 Hand Portable TETRA Radio
which is currently being used by our Airport
CARE Ambassadors. As you know the airport
A National Audit Ofce (NAO) report
has noted that “implementing the
Emergency Services Network – ESN is
now expected to cost £3.1bn more than
forecast in 2015, and the revised forecast
costs are highly uncertain”.
In total, the project is expected to
cost up to £9.3bn to 2037, up 49 per
cent from the gure given by the Home
Ofce in its 2015 business case. The
Home Ofce has delayed approving the
business case for the reset until later this
year. It is also expecting to revise its cost
forecast later in 2019.
The Home Ofce still expects ESN to
be cheaper than Airwave in the long term,
expecting the project to break even in
July 2029, seven years later than initially
planned, and the total nancial and
economic savings are expected to be
£1.5bn in the period to 2037.
It announced a reset of its approach to
ESN delivery in September 2018, based
on a phased introduction of ESN services
as opposed to the ‘big bang’ transition
strategy it had previously pursued (in
which each region would adopt all of
the ESN functionality in one go while
migrating off Airwave). The Home Ofce
now plans to complete ESN by the slated
Airwave switch-off date of December
2022, but the report says the emergency
services consider the 27 months this
provides for transition to be unrealistic
and that four years will beneeded.
This, in addition to Home Ofce
risk assessments that have agged
emergency services’ potential
unwillingness to transition until their
control rooms have been upgraded for
the service and the one year’s notice that
would be needed to turn off Airwave after
the last force has transitioned to ESN,
has led the NAO to “estimate that under
a potential ‘near worst-case’ scenario,
the Airwave shutdown could be delayed
by four years” to December 2026.
The NAO report can be downloaded
via https://bit.ly/2DYCkqE, while
the transcript of a Public Accounts
Committee hearing in which the Home
Ofce was questioned on many of
the points raised in the report can be
accessed via https://bit.ly/2QvGifm.
environment can be very noisy, so we require
a device that can provide powerful audio. e
SC21 is also a very robust device and this is
important to us as the airport is in operation
24/7. e SC21 is also very compact,
making it easy for our sta
to carry it around all the
time, thereby making it
convenient to attend
to the needs of airport
guests in a timely
fashion.”
He added: “e
SC21 has certainly
helped contribute to
the Malaysia Airports
‘Happy Guests, Caring
Hosts’ service culture.”
Terence Ledger, sales
and marketing director at
Sepura, added: “We are pleased
to see MAHB continuing close cooperation
with Sepura on managing their
communications eectively; they can now
begin to see the benets of next-generation
TETRA technology with their upgrade to
SC2 series terminals and we are excited to see
what the future holds for data applications
inairports.”
Mexico: Airbus’s
SMVNO service
Airbus has launched MXLINK, its
secure mobile virtual network operator
(SMVNO) for Mexican public safety
and defence authorities. It oers multi-operator
coverage, interoperability with the National
Radiocommunication Tetrapol Network, and
end-to-end voice and data security.
MXLINK leverages a number of
technological advances in the country, such as
the deployment of Red Compartida (a publicprivate
partnership-type project by the Mexican
government and Altan Redes, a Spanish
consortium, to bring broadband connectivity
to 92 per cent of the Mexican population).
End-users can access Airbus’s portfolio of
applications, including Tactilon Agnet, which
delivers secure, multimedia instant messaging,
push-to-video, intelligent tactical awareness
features, and location mapping, as well as
mission-critical push-to-talk (MCPTT) and
end-to-end encryption.
e National Radiocommunication Network,
which was initially deployed in 1999, today
covers 85 per cent of the population and 50
per cent of the Mexican territory with Tetrapol
technology, and supports more than 100,000
active terminals.
Airbus signalled its intention to create an
SMVNO in Mexico in 2017 and at the time
announced it had selected Nokia as a technology
partner, with Nokia providing a Mini Compact
Core, specically designed for private LTE
networks, which can prioritise public safety
voice, data and video trac over normal trac
and also oers secure subscriber management
and separation of emergency trac.
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