The service covered by the contract requires telent to develop and provide a coverage testing app that will work autonomously and be installed onto devices that will operate on either the commercial 4G network or ESN (as required) and for it to be deployed in the field.
Telent will also be required to provide drive- and walk-test services, as directed by the Home Office, along with a help desk to support the solution, a training service and potentially three optional services. These include provisioning 1,000 4G devices, hosting the server and drive test server and ensuring that all of the data can be transferred over to the Home Office’s own cloud-hosted environment when requested. The third option covers the supply of equipment and services to support the measurement of voice quality on the ESN, using a subset of around 50 ESN devices taken from a total population of 1,000-2,500 ESN devices (which, given a potential total user population of around 300,000, is likely to represent the devices that are being centrally procured by the Home Office for use during major operational trials).
Telent’s tender beat six others, four of which were from SMEs, and the contract award notice said 48 per cent of the tender (by value) is likely to be subcontracted to third parties.
As covered in last issue’s news analysis, the Home Office has opted for a new ‘strategic direction’ for ESN roll-out, which includes a data-first and incremental approach to service delivery and will extend the life of the Airwave network until the end of 2022, with an option for further extension.
