1.5 The main recommendations of the reviews were that the Police and Fire Services required new systems and that the provision of these should be directed on a national basis. Furthermore, the new systems should be shared by the Police and Fire Services, along with other public safety users, if their requirements were met and it was cost effective to do so. To put these recommendations into effect, the Public Safety Radio Communications Project (Airwave) was initiated. A number of issues were considered.
1.6 National vs. Regional: The Home Office extensively researched, and consulted with the radio industry, on the options for procuring new systems on local, regional and national bases. Local procurements were discounted, since they were unlikely to achieve any economies of scale in the costs of procurement or in the prices to be paid for the new systems. There were significant obstacles to a series of regional procurements. The absence of a European standard for the interfaces between systems meant that it might not have been possible to link police forces together under a common system and maintain adequate levels of security through encryption across the UK. In addition, procurement and development costs would have been duplicated in comparison with a single national project. A national project was the preferred option but was not without difficulties. For example, the interests of over 100 stakeholders would have to be managed.
1.7 Central procurement with peripheral equipment procured locally: In order to implement a national strategy for renewing radio systems, the Home Office decided to run the procurement centrally. However, police forces would procure their own peripheral equipment such as handsets and control room equipment.
1.8 TETRA was chosen as the best technology to deliver the project objectives: Various technologies were considered for the new system. Research involved extensive market consultation and co-operation between PITO and manufacturers to ensure that the best available technology would be used. The GSM digital cellular standard (i.e. similar to mobile phones) was not considered to be suitable, since it would not have met several fundamental requirements. For instance, it would not allow rapid call set-up, so police officers would have to wait for a call to be processed rather than gaining immediate access to the system. It would also be difficult to reconfigure user talk groups while in the field and the efficiency of the use of the radio spectrum would be poor, compared to alternatives. Most of the other options assessed were proprietary and consequently would only offer one potential source of supply. Digital trunked products, conforming to the European TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio) standard, designed specifically for public safety and professional users, emerged as the best option. TETRA products were expected to have the greatest spectral efficiency, and were expected to meet other needs, such as speed of call set up and the flexibility to set up and change the membership of talk groups. Although TETRA products are now available, in the mid 1990s, only pre-production forms of TETRA equipment existed.
1.9 Use of the Private Finance Initiative: The use of the PFI was seen as a way of engendering innovation by allowing the private sector to develop solutions for the new service. To support this, each short listed bidder would be contracted to produce a project definition study. The bidders would be provided with copies of the functional specification for the service and available service level requirements. Using this information, they were to research, plan and design their systems for delivering the required service. In effect, bidders would be granted an early opportunity to use innovation in the design, maintenance and operation of the network. A further reason for the project definition studies was that the Home Office wanted to evaluate technical proposals to assure itself that the design of the winning bidder's system was justified.