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• Mobile

By Natasha Lomas, 11 June 2009 16:17

COMMENT

...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.