'Airwave does do data - unlike what some of the media say'
CEO Richard Bobbett on the future of emergency services comms...
Airwave CEO talks to silicon.com about the future of emergency services comms, the 2012 Olympics and data question marks
O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone may loom large on most people's mobile radar but for the emergency services the name that matters is Airwave: every UK police force uses Airwave's Tetra network for their radio communications and, in the next year, every ambulance trust and Fire & Rescue service will be hooked up to the dedicated emergency services network too.
In recent years the company has been busy expanding its user base, both at home - Air Ambulances have just signed on the dotted line and the Highways Agency continues to beef up its involvement - and also abroad, recently launching a German arm.
Another big project keeping the company busy is the 2012 London Olympic Games, for which it is supplying radio comms.
It's also working on a second phase of its London Underground network rollout - to boost capacity at some major Tube stations and to fill in coverage blackspots in tunnels on overground parts of the Underground network.
But what about mobile data? Is Airwave's network fit for purpose in an age of next generation data demand?
Last year the head of biometrics at the National Policing Improvement Agency, Geoff Whitaker, claimed the Airwave network was not - "at present" - able to handle image file sizes generated by a trial of mobile biometric fingerprint scanners, Project Lantern.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with silicon.com, Airwave CEO Richard Bobbett was keen to clear up the question mark hanging over Airwave and data.
"Airwave does do data," he said. "Unlike what some of the media say."
And despite Whitaker's comments, dealing with fingerprint data is not a problem for Airwave, according to Bobbett.
"You can do fingerprint scanning over Tetra... We've certainly demoed that and that is something that's available," he said.
No UK police forces are at present, however, using Tetra for fingerprint scanning.
So what data applications is Tetra used for? The CEO said the use of two-digit codes to send simple status messages such as 'I've arrived on the scene' - is a popular Tetra application with the Fire & Rescue service.
Airwave also offers an SMS-style service which can be used to send location information in conjunction with a handset's GPS. "A lot of our handsets have got a GPS chip," Bobbett explained. "[It's] very effective if you want to know where all your resources are, your vehicles are - very, very effective. And the Met Police are just turning on personal location."
Video however is one data application unlikely to make an appearance on Airwave's Tetra network. "I will be honest with you - I think moving video is probably one step beyond the network today," Bobbett said. "We are never going to push much beyond a GPRS-type throughput on our packet data channel. If you want a moving video - a high quality moving video image - even at GPRS-type speeds, you're not going to get that," Bobbett said.
And, when it comes to mobile video, the CEO claimed he's not hearing any great demand from the emergency services. "I talk to chief constables every day and most of them say to me they have no idea what they would do with ," he claims. "It sounds great but I've no idea what my officer would do with it. Because if they're driving they can't be looking at it and when they get [to the incident] and they're then face to face with you, you can't take them away to the handset."
"The way I would look at it, 90 per cent of what a police officer wants to do...
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...at the curbside today can be done on Tetra easily," he added.
However Bobbett said there may be more of a case for video for another of Airwave's customers: the ambulance service. "[With] trauma cases where there is intrusive wounds... people might want to see video," he said. "We're getting to the case where video might - might - play a case there."
Video may be off the cards but the company is not standing still on the tech front. In its test centre just north of London it's exploring what Bobbett calls "fast, deployable, breadcrumb type wireless networks" - which can be rolled out piece by piece on the fly - which could be used in conjunction with wireless heart rate monitors and motion detectors to, for instance, monitor a firefighter who's been sent into a burning building.
"Those are the sorts of things we're playing around with our customers today," said Bobbett. "Nothing's out there - no one's using it for real but there are some trials going on, and we're certainly active in those trials."
And there's no doubt that clever use of technology is going to become increasingly important for Airwave over the coming years as, according to Bobbett, there are no public funds to build a new data network to complement Tetra.
"Much as I'd love to be able to sit here and tell you that I think public funding for a dedicated standalone emergency services broadband network exists, clearly it doesn't. There isn't public funding for that out there - you can create all the wish lists that you want... the public fund just isn't going to stretch to building a dedicated broadband network," he told silicon.com.
As a result, Airwave is now having to make the best use of existing public networks and the company is already working on a product that might be able to send data packets over such networks and then rebuild them at the other end.
Such a scenario could involve splitting up pieces of information at the point of sending and then reconnecting them at the other end on the device. A photograph, for instance, would be sent over a faster, public network but an associated criminal record would be detached from it and funnelled over Tetra with its full encrypted security.
"I can use enough diverse paths that make it resilient enough for my customers and I can make it look like a mission critical system, without that huge public investment. That's where I see mobile data for my users in the next three to five years," Bobbett said.