One aspect of the programme which proved unexpectedly time-consuming was that of specifying control rooms for the various agencies. To be supplied by Frequentis, these will range from large centres for the main agencies down to a host of smaller ones in the health service, including local response centres and doctors on call. 

“That’s taken a lot of attention from us”, says Dagfinn Sjøvik, project manager for Nødnett. “Just clarifying the scope of what is relevant for a big project and what is third-party applications for the end users – where do you draw the line? What’s in the project, what’s outside the project? From the technical point of view, it creates discussions on the interfacing: who is responsible. And that increases risk to the overall project as well, because technically it needs to work.

“Technical issues are only half the story of this. In order to get a good public safety network to work, you also need to work on the operational procedures in the background here – on the control room, on the terminal side. And the more you add of technical solutions in the control room, the more you dig into the operational procedure domain of the end users.

“Say you want to go live with an agency: the more you add, the more risk you put into it. Then there’s something initially not linked to the main project that keeps you from starting using the whole service.

“We also need to respect that the service we bring in here is a part of a bigger chain of emergency handling of agencies, so what seems to be a clear line for us – this is inside their contract, if you will, and this is outside their contract – if you put on a police hat or an ambulance hat, he doesn’t see the same clear border.”