In the west of England, police and fire and rescue services in the county of Wiltshire have combined their communications with technology which will improve productivity and save money for both bodies. Already they are benefiting from big cost savings.

Using a Software Integrated Communications Control System (SICCS) hosted by the control room systems supplier APD, Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service (FRS) now shares the police telephony platform. This enables it for the first time to access the full range of TETRA features on the national Airwave network, at a fraction of the cost of buying a dedicated ICCS. The FRS control room simply connects to the existing joint fire/police APD Cortex system, which is partitioned so each emergency service has a dedicated system, tailored for its needs.

“The decision to deploy the joint service was a simple one”, explained John Cox, of Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service. “The hosted nature of the Cortex SICCS service, combined with the ability to share services, will help us meet new budget cuts, secure ROI [return on investment] quickly, while helping us improve the service we offer.

“The joint service will also help from a strategic level – providing senior officers within both organizations with access to a complete view of incidents that involve fire and police.”

Pooled capacity

With the hosted SICCS, Wiltshire Police are making savings by cutting the number of CCI (Command and Control Interface) ports they require from Airwave. Functionality within the hosted Cortex SICCS allows pooling and virtual reallocation of CCI ports between multiple organizations. In this way, Wiltshire FRS can now use any CCI ports not being used by Wiltshire Police, increasing the capacity of their service at no additional cost.

Airwave features now available to Wiltshire FRS which had previously been available only to the police include the ability to monitor, control and patch together multiple talk group channels, respond to emergency alarms, override transmissions, receive status messages, Dynamic Group Number Assignment (DGNA) and the ability to stun radio terminals. APD’s SICCS also provides a full range of call-handling functionality, including automatic call distribution, caller name, address and GPS location.