23 Sep 2016

ESN update: core specifications now with device vendors

Jeremy Kemp, technical lead – related projects at the Home Office, said that last week the suite of core specifications from EE and Motorola Solutions were made available for the first time, “which will allow device vendors to start looking very seriously at their development and getting devices ready for the accreditation process [NATS].” Kemp made his comments during a session on the Emergency Services Network (ESN) at the Emergency Services Show on Wednesday (21 September).

He added that that Motorola Solutions’ sandbox environment for control room vendors is live and four vendors are attached to it. One of the vendors has already demonstrated end-to-end group calls between their control room systems and the sandbox PTT service and back again. Kemp said that Motorola Solutions launched the first phase of their network approval testing for control rooms, using the first release of their software.

Kemp said that there has also been a lot of progress in terms of interworking between the Airwave TETRA network and ESN. This will happen as a central gateway solution between the two networks (also to be provided by ESN) and that “fairly significant upgrades to the Airwave network need to be required for that interworking solution to happen”. He added that the equipment has been shipped to all the relevant sites and is currently going through SAT (site acceptance testing) and it is on-target for cut-over in January.