By Kate Hanaghan, 6 March 2002 15:30
NEWS BT's Airwave service is to be adopted by UK police and other defence users in a strategy shake-up by the MoD.
The Ministry has decided that this mainland radio communications network will now become its 'de facto' standard.
The Airwave service is maintained by mm02 following its demerger from BT last November. It operates at what is known as a 'restricted' level of security - as assessed by the government's Computing and Electronic Security Group (CESG).
The system uses authentication and encryption procedures to protect traffic from unauthorised access. Airwave can, however, be enhanced for users that want more sophisticated encryption.
BT is topping up the original contract - brokered in March 2000 and estimated to be worth approx £3.5bn - with millions of pounds worth of extra business.
If all the Defence users adopt the service, and this includes fire, health and other public safety users the resulting business could be worth an additional £50 million to BT.
Chris Mason, solutions consultant at BT central government department, explained that the implementation logistics are immense.
mm02 will work force-by-force across 53 police sectors in the UK to migrate users, systems, processes and support personnel from one radio scheme to another without any disruption to operations.
He told silicon.com: "As you may imagine, this is a highly detailed and complex process."
The agreement is in line with the government's 2005 deadline for migrating the emergency services from analogue to digital radio systems.
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