Met spends £25m to back Airwave

The Metropolitan Police is spending £25m on a communications platform that will support the Force's use of the forthcoming Airwave Tetra-based radio technology.

The Integrated Communications Platform (ICP) will also be used as the base technology in three new central control rooms that are being built for use by the Met and its colleagues in the City of London Police.

The Met has awarded a seven-year contract to NTL to build the ICP, which will form the centre stone of its future communication strategy.

'The Airwave project has driven the need to replace our existing system,' Paul Oatway, the Met's ICP project manager told Computing.

'At the same time the C3i project (Command, Control, Communications, and Information) has come about, which is changing the way we take calls from the public and how we allocate resources to incidents. We realised we had to do something because of Airwave and decided to get an integrated system that would also cover C3i,' he said.

The ICP will allow police controllers in three new, state-of-the art control rooms that are currently being built in Hendon, Lambeth and Bow, to communicate with 3,500 CCTV camera across the capital.

'It will provide significantly better support to the police officers that are supporting the people of London,' Oatway said. 'It will allow us to quickly identify officers that are available to react to an incident and allow us to support officers by being able to see what's happening through the CCTV cameras and the near vicinity and put more support in to the officer is in trouble.'

Under the terms of the contract NTL will provide project management, installation and commissioning, as well as ongoing maintenance once the system is operational.

Oatway says implementation is now under way.

'Airwave [Tetra] becomes available to the Met in the last quarter of this year and the ICP is due for delivery in November of this year, so the two will come together,' Oatway said. 'We then have to go through a significant systems integration process, and make sure it is integrated with our other IT systems within the Met.'

See also:

Met Police updates 999 call handling

New system will divert non-emergency calls away from 999 lines  18 Feb 2004

Airwave looks to boost data over Tetra

Animal welfare officers and utilities targeted for beefed up police network  17 Dec 2003

Police shun £2.9bn network for mobile data

Forces set to go their own way on 'vital' part of Tetra contract  29 Sep 2003

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