SIAE UK and the Emergency Services Sector
Our Emergency Services undertake a really challenging task and must perform their duties on a constant 24/7 basis. The situation in which the Emergency Services operate can truly be classified as 'mission critical' - involving, as it does, the fate of peoples lives.
In this environment, the topicality and routing of information is of no less critical importance than the experience and ability to take appropriate decisions and convert these to prompt action in order to achieve desired outcomes.
In fact the entire decision-making process is almost entirely redundant without accurate and timely data delivered to the correct location. Recent disclosures surrounding the 9/11 terrorist incidents in America demonstrate this only too clearly when one learns that defensive fighter planes were scrambled to meet a supposed incoming aerial threat and yet the controllers did not know the location or track of the plane they were meant to intercept, nor the very fact that the plane was down before they launched.
Converged Wireless WANs
Wireless Networks have significant advantages to offer to the Emergency Services and there is not a single Emergency Service that does not already use this technology in some way or another. However the real advantages of using wireless is in the achievement of Converged IP Networks and this simple fact is now being accepted across the country as a means of achieving multiple technical and commercial imperatives through a single procurement.
One basic but key element is a common requirement to all Emergency Services, and this is the need for a stable, reliable, secure and resilient means of communication.
Stable, Reliable, Available and Resilient
With the best part of 100,000 microwave wireless links carrying mission critical traffic already installed throughout the UK, wireless technology has been accepted as a key enabler now for over 50 years. However in the last 15 years, not only has the reliability of equipments reached new peaks with equipment MTBFs measured on decades, but the price/performance ratio has steadily improved as the value of this technology has crested to it's current levels.
This combination of reliability and value for money has now been matched by availability of true IP equipments and it is this latter fact that has championed the rush towards the further value to be gained by operating a single resilient network for all applications - there is no linger a need for separate networks for voice, data, video, telemetry and so on - these can now be achieved cost-effectivley and without compromising the ability to meet mission critical requirements.
In the implementation of Converged Networks, the arrival of the high bandwidth true Ethernet products, such as SIAE's AL range operating at 105Mbps, offer industry leading levels of bang per buck. Consider for example the fact that an SDH radio link requires a high cost router in order to maximise the throughput of Ethernet traffic against the true IP radio like the AL which simply provides an RJ45 plug and dleivers full output without the need for the router - major cost saving, increased reliability, less spares stock-holding....
Wireless has another role to play in the provision of true resilience. The Emergency Services require 'real', objectively assessed resilience - the sort of dependable stand-by circuit that just must be there when disaster strikes.
It's known within the Industry that some resilient services are sold under the 'Assured Resilience' banner as a product which enters a building at two entry points and therefore offers a resilient connection to that building. This argument is fine up to a point, however if it is the case that the two fibres or copper cables then come together outside the building and run together down the same duct which at some point collides with the same JCB on a building site, then perhaps this cannot be regarded as truly resilient.
What wireless can offer here is true resilience - geographic reslience by exiting the building at two points - but also path resilience by traversing completely separate routes to the destination. The ultimate solution would of course use a combination of technologies in order to achieve geographic, path, and technology reslience.
