EE on Thursday bagged a deal to provide mobile voice and data services for the U.K.’s emergency services.
Backed by the operator’s 4G network, the service aims to enhance the capabilities of the country’s 300,000-strong police, fire, and ambulance crews by making use of high-speed mobile connectivity and applications.
Examples proffered by EE include forwarding vital information about a patient from an ambulance to a hospital; live streaming video from a police officer’s body-worn camera; or enabling fire crews to access the blueprints of a burning building on a tablet.
"We are immensely proud to be selected to deliver this vital new network for Britain’s emergency services. We’ve worked closely with the police and ambulance crews to show the power of 4G in helping save time and save lives," said EE chief executive Olaf Swantee, in a statement.
The contract was awarded to EE under the government’s £1 billion Emergency Services Mobile Communications Programme (ESMCP).
To make sure its network is up to the task of supporting critical communication services, EE will deploy 500 new cell sites, as well as a dedicated, resilient core network. It will also create a fleet of rapid response vehicles tasked with fixing any outages that could affect emergency services communications.
The operator will also roll out LTE on its 800-MHz spectrum to improve coverage in indoor and rural locations, and establish satellite backhaul links to improve coverage in extremely remote areas.
In addition, EE will also enable voice over LTE (VoLTE) and push-to-talk (PTT) over LTE for the emergency services. Its network will also be able to prioritise traffic from the emergency services if necessary.
All this work will take some time though, and the first end users are not due to be transferred to the new network until mid-2017.
EE "will now work tirelessly to deliver a highly resilient, truly nationwide 4G network to serve all of Britain’s blue light and first responder teams," said Swantee.
