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No.13 - 15th April 2007

Posted: Sat May 26, 2007 3:04 pm
by Steven Cole
Welcome to the third of my Ramblings for 2007
Hello and welcome to the site.

DTELS Sale, Thirteen Years On...
There has been much speculation in the media of late that Airwave is to be sold off.

An article in the Times Business Section on April 6th highlighted that Macquarie are in a period of exclusivity with Telef?nica, owner of 02 (of which Airwave is part of that group) with a view to securing a deal for the Airwave business.

Whether the Australian Bank, who?s acquisition portfolio includes Arqiva, reaches a satisfactory conclusion remains to be seen. If not, there appears to be a number of other potential suitors including BT on the side.

Looking back to the early 90?s I seem to recall that one of the primary reasons promulgated to staff for the Government of the day selling DTELS to the private sector was to remove a public sector market monopoly, thereby seen to be giving the emergency services wider and more democratic procurement choice.

Of course, the wheels of life move on and there was a lot of good operational reasons why the emergency services should have a shared radio infrastructure.
The WARC driven analogue network, which the Directorate planned and implemented during the 80?s, was not designed to be agency interoperable (other than at basic level), have the service functionality or extended coverage that emergency service providers require in the 21st century.

After the 1993 Emergency Service Radio Communications Review, which had determined a need for a replacement (digital) network, to their credit Airwave met the challenge early on and have since become the major provider to the UK emergency services of a national digital network.

Now thirteen years on since the DTELS trade-sale, the net effect appears to be that the emergency services are in effect still locked to a single source for the all important radio infrastructure, only this time the private sector, which is in the business of making a profit. Whether pro-rata the public purse benefited from such a move remains open to speculation.....

Latest Update
This month sees many new items added to the site and I would like to thank the contributors who have e-mailed or given me material. Please keep it coming and ask your old colleagues or friends if they have pictures or other material for publication.

Until the next time, all the best and remember to keep visiting this site!

Regards

Steven....
15th April 2007