UK aims to award LTE emergency call contract by May 2015
The UK government plans to award a GBP 1.2 billion contract before the election in May 2015 to move emergency service communication from a dedicated Tetra network to LTE
LTE is faster and enables data transfer. Operators would give priority to emergency services, which has raised some concerns that it would affect service for private users. The opposition Labour party has called on the government to halt the tender, with shadow policing minister Jack Dromey saying that the “unseemly haste” to award the contract before the election left no time to test it.
The Home Office said it was on track to award contracts, split into four lots, next year and to start the new network in 2016 or 2017. It added that tenders from the Tetra account holder Airwave as well as Arqiva, EE, Telefonica UK (O2) and Vodafone are being evaluated. Mobile operators told the Financial Times that their LTE networks will be as reliable as Tetra and would dramatically reduce the cost of handsets, to GBP 30 rather than GBP 3,000. According to one industry executive, the emergency LTE networks will be in place to connect the first police forces by 2016, but it is likely to take another year to reach the entire country, during which time the new networks would run alongside Tetra.
