£2B and 8 Years On, Still No Emergency Services Network

upstart writes:

And not even a tentative date for a system go-live either:

By the end of this month, the UK Home Office will have spent just under 2 billion ($2.4 billion) on a new critical communications network for the country's police, fire and ambulance services - with nothing to show for it, according to a report by the National Audit Office (NAO).

Even worse, the multi-year project has fallen further behind schedule and the Home Office cannot say when the replacement system will be operational, according to the spending watchdog.

The Emergency Services Network (ESN) program first kicked off in 2015 - the idea being that it would fully replace the existing near-indestructible Airwave units and system, which uses the Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) network; would "cost less"; and would provide users with access to modern mobile data. ESN was supposed to move critical emergency services off of the tried and tested TETRA (which, among other things, you can access ubiquitously across the London Underground) and onto LTE radio comms - with some obvious modifications and associated features like the push-to-talk ESN Direct.

[...] The UK's Competition and Markets Authority started a probe into the matter in 2021, with the PAC already noting in 2019 that Motorola's involvement in both the new and old contract had led "to perverse incentives" and put "the department in a weak negotiating position." Motorola has denied conflict of interest and said last year that "Airwave, over its life, is a much better deal for the UK taxpayer than the Home Office originally agreed."

[...] In January, eight years after the first proposals for a new system to replace the outdated Airwave platform were unveiled, the Home Office and Motorola Solutions agreed to end their work on the ESN contract in December 2023.

The Home Office, meanwhile, does not currently know when ESN will be ready or how much it will ultimately cost.

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