Motorola splashes £817m buying out police comms biz Airwave

Apart from the lack of 4G coverage outside urban areas, LTE and other telco cellular technologies have a habit of collapsing at major events or incidents when large numbers of people get their phones out to ring home

This makes sense

Airwave are the only player with the knowledge on how to maintain the base stations.

Motorola provide all the current kit.

Noone else can get anywhere near their geographical coverage and won't in time for the renewals.

It is highly likely the Airwave contract will be extended.

I speak from experience having worked 4 years at Airwave.

Litigation

Airwave litigating about the 4G award, how strange.

On the other hand not so strange when you consider Motorola got very litigious when the original Airwave contract evaluation was allegedly in favour of Nokia.

Can't imagine why I am posting as AC.

Let's hope the emergency services personnel carry personal phones on them too hopefully on a different network to EE.

Bit of a gamble for Motorola, what if they don't extend the contact with Airwave.

EE have the network but...

So, while EE won (by default) the network bid, look who won the service delivery part of ESMCP.. The organisation that has the contract for making the whole shebang work is

.....

Motorola.

prepare to bleed pounds to the usa

All I can see is a lot of wasted tax payer money going to US corporate

home office wanted to split up the contract 'known as 'airwave/tetra' so it could get out of lock in and now they have gone full circle

motorola has no interest in pushing VoLTE unless it is on there own hardware platform so tetra will stay in place for years and uk has got shafted.

Next thing we will see is the home office talking risk of having all this hardware from one company and it is something which is valid, consider this if the radios can be owned by remote exploit you could cripple all radios from said vendor. there would be some red faces people!

The new emergency services network, or virtual network, is coming... But I don't think we currently have the sort of the phone coverage the emergency services need. LTE could provide that, along with high speed broadband for unconnected consumers, but it will be expensive. It's not been done so far because it's uneconomic.

I suspect what we will see is continued use of the Airwave TETRA system at least into the medium term with a phased introduction of LTE.

I don't think that's why Motorola have bought Airwave though. Motorola are in the frame for the user services part of the ESMCP. They'll be providing user management, applications and solutions for the end users. This is where Motorola Solutions - what used to be the radio part of Motorola - see their market heading, and where the money is to be made. What they need is an organisation of people who can interface with the emergency services - that's harder to build than a physical radio network. In acquiring Airwave they can ensure a smooth migration from TETRA to LTE in the UK. Other countries will be watching, and opportunities will form.

The future of the private TETRA network probably depends more on world events and the performance of the virtually private but ultimately public LTE network than anything else.