Fife Constabulary

Fife Constabulary is one of eight Scottish police forces and the second smallest, with about 1,000 officers and 500 staff working in support roles. The organisation has its headquarters in a new purpose-built centre in Glenrothes.

The area, with a population of 350,000, is a mixture of urban and rural districts, which makes the need for reliable and secure access to information on the beat a priority for Bill Parker, Fife Constabulary head of communications and IT.

‘In this part of the world, sometimes you do have coverage problems no matter what the provider you use,’ he says.

‘But we have been using various methods and technologies to get information out to both the front-end uniformed and senior officers when and how they need it. Under an agreement we have with the local council we have 150 handsets provided by T-Mobile, but knew we needed more.’

A need was identified for senior staff in particular to be well-connected when not physically connected to the network. There is a constant pressure for these staff, at what Parker calls ‘the sharp end’, to have the most up-to-date intelligence.

‘These staff all have laptops, so we invested in a number of T-Mobile Communication Centres, which is the single PC card with a software interface that connects users to the fastest available network, be that GPRS, 3G or WiFi,’ says Parker.

Such connectivity would have been useful, but a single incident threw the need for the constabulary to have good communication into sharp focus.

Fife officers became involved in the planning for security arrangements for last July’s G8 summit at Gleneagles.

‘We realised we did not have the right infrastructure to get effectively real-time intelligence updates,’ he says. ‘The combination of 3G and Citrix came in very handy here to close that gap.’

Parker expects to focus his force’s future 3G work on better supporting forensics.

‘We are providing a number of ruggedised PCs for our scene of crime officers so that they can get all the evidence information they need sent straight back to base, instead of wasting time taking notes at a location then having to go back and physically enter it in a computer,’ he says.

‘All in all, 3G gives us the ability to continue to do business away from base.’

User experiences

Many private sector firms seem to be dabbling with 3G as part of their mobility strategy. And some organisations are already reporting solid achievements.

‘The future is that work is what we do, not where we go,’ says Myron Hrycyk, IT director of automotive logistics supplier Unipart, which has started enabling its workforce with 3G-ready laptops and has recently introduced WiMax at one of its Midlands distribution centres.

‘From our business perspective, it is incredibly important to have a flexible and mobile workforce. We needed to establish a new strategy in response to that, and create a more flexible infrastructure.

‘Doing that meant a far more rapid deployment of the system, and the overall cost was a lot lower. Also, we aren’t paying leased-line charges, which is welcome.’

Another convert is Richard Jarvis, financial controller at the GB Group, a Chester-based software house specialising in data integrity systems. ‘We are a relatively late adopter of 3G technology, but had been watching it from the sidelines for some time,’ he says.

What eventually tipped the balance was a requirement to demonstrate internet-based technology at client offices.

‘It is best to do this wirelessly for two reasons. First, it is not always convenient – in terms of access or time – to physically plug into someone else’s network, and using cached, offline copies of things is less and less acceptable these days,’ he says.

The firm also found WiFi and hotspots to be less than 100 per cent effective.

‘Our guys were forever swapping cards in and out, and didn’t want the hassle any more,’ says Jarvis.

As a result, GB’s field sales force is now equipped with some 30 3G cards that provide broadband-level access to laptops.

‘From an efficiency perspective, the 3G cards let our field-based people be connected all day and to take advantage of those traditional dead periods throughout the day, as opposed to doing things in the evening,’ says Jarvis.

‘After a long hard day in the field, staff used to get home and then log onto the network in the evening to pick up their emails and update themselves with the latest information.

‘Now the clients can also see how their system would look like for them, not a dummy version.’

Third-generation facts and lessons

Take-up of 3G among consumers space has hardly been stellar. Analyst Ovum predicted at the end of 2002 that the total number of global 3G connections would reach 66.4 million by the end of 2004 and more than 251 million by the start of 2007. But only two per cent of UK mobile users were on 3G networks at the end of 2005, according to Informa Telecoms and Media.

Meanwhile, a poll carried out by YouGov in February found that found that 73 per cent of 2,000 UK users of 3G phones rarely used such services, and more than a quarter did not see the need to access them at all.

The move to 3G was necessary because GSM had reached capacity and will eventually be switched off. We should not see 3G as an end game, but a step in an evolution. Adrian Baschnonga, senior telecoms analyst, Ernst & Young

We have 3G being installed fairly rapidly at last, in markets where spectrum has been allocated, such as the US and most of Europe. In both these regions, additional spectrum will be auctioned in 2006-7. Of the three official 3G technologies, wideband code-division multiple access (W-CDMA) is mandated in the EU, CDMA2000 is mainly popular in north America and parts of Asia, and Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA) is the Chinese implementation, which will probably be rolled out by at least one Chinese operator. Caroline Gabriel, research director, Rethink Research Associates

Expect to see the 3G madness happen all over again. Last November, national media regulator Ofcom announced that discussions had started on how best to allocate the analogue spectrum after the terrestrial channels switch to digital TV by 2012. The idea is that the now-unneeded, but valuable, UHF bandwidth can be used by mobile operators and broadband providers as the platform for a set of next-generation high-definition services. Examples being suggested include mobile services, wireless broadband, high-definition interactive TV, local television content and high-speed wireless for rural areas. Surely an apt observation comes from Karl Marx: ‘Those who do not observe the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them, first as tragedy, then as farce.