Emergency Services Network

The Emergency Services Network (ESN) is an ongoing project to create a truly next-generation communications system for the UK’s police, fire and rescue, and ambulance services. It’s going to be a unified, integrated Long-Term Evolution (LTE) network that can carry critical data applications and broadband services as well as voice communications, and will be more resilient, reliable and secure than the current, disparate networks. It will enable the three emergency services to communicate and collaborate with each other, ultimately working more effectively and saving more lives. In short, it is intended to carry the UK’s emergency services into the future.

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Critical Communications

January is a month for fresh starts, and looking to the year ahead. With this in mind what will the coming twelve months hold for the world of critical communications? Here are our key ideas…

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LCNI 2017

Simoco Wireless Solutions took a trip to Telford recently for this year’s Low Carbon Networks & Innovation Conference (LCNI).

Aimed at organisations working in the energy sector, the conference looked at driving innovations and efficiencies that can power a low carbon future – one of today’s most important global priorities.

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Going underground

Tunnels

One of the UK’s biggest engineering projects marked a major milestone in October, as it was revealed that an Elizabeth line train has been hauled through the Crossrail tunnel for the very first time.

Crossrail is set to increase the rail capacity in central London by 10%, and is expected to carry around 200 million passengers a year when fully open. Its main feature is 13 miles of new twin tunnels, right through central London.

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LTE

Have you got an Apple Watch yet? The third iteration of the device was recently launched – and, as outlined here, it comes with one very distinctive new feature – LTE connectivity.

The jury is still out as to whether this is a game-changing development for the Apple Watch or just a nice-to-have, and regardless of how it ends up positioning Apple in the marketplace, it’s certainly had some technical difficulties to iron out.

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Managed Services

Your communications network sustains the flow of information in your organisation, and so how it is implemented and maintained is of critical importance to your business.

While the initial infrastructure and capabilities of a network are of primary concern and often dominate decision making, considering all phases of installation and management can help ensure a smooth operator and user experience and reduce the potential for future issues.

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Facility Management

‘Single site’ covers a lot of bases. Single site organisations can be as small as an individual shop or office – or as huge and complex as hospitals, universities and even festival sites and holiday parks. Clearly, such sites have very different communications challenges from their smaller cousins.

Thousands or even tens of thousands of people work across these large single site organisations. Some, of course, are unique to particular sectors, such as the health practitioners in hospitals, but a huge proportion operate in all industries, from cleaners and maintenance staff to security personnel. These staff make up facilities management – and for them, communications are critical.

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Energy Efficiency

The drive for more environmentally friendly worldwide energy policies hit a major bump in the road last month when the USA announced plans to pull out of the Paris climate accord.

The agreement was drawn up within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It is due to kick off in the year 2020, responding to the growing climate threat with greenhouse gas emissions mitigation, adaptation and finance. In short, it has become a key building block in the global fight against climate change.

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Testing the age of LTE

LTE

The LTE era moved a little closer this month, with the first interoperability tests for mission-critical LTE scheduled to take place at the ETSI headquarters in France.

What does this mean in practice? LTE stands for Long Term Evolution. It’s a next generation standard for mobile communications, the latest iteration of an evolution that started with the analogue 1G standard in the 1980s. LTE increases both the speed and latency of wireless communications, which in turn increases reliability, clarity and mobility, with the opportunity to add more data-rich applications to communications networks.

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Airports

British Airways (BA) hit the headlines over the recent bank holiday weekend when more than 300,000 passengers were severely delayed due to a catastrophic computing failure. The truth of what actually occurred is still emerging, even several weeks on. While some have blamed the outage on a power surge so powerful that it rendered the back-up system ineffective it has been suggested from various quarters that this only seems to be part of the picture.

Either way, the fallout has served to underline how, in the complex world of 21st century aviation, a single technical problem can rapidly spiral and have a truly enormous impact. Hundreds of thousands of passengers delayed and a subsequent compensation bill that may run into the millions. On top of this there’s the potential for severe reputational damage and the loss of future revenue this can bring.

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