Amsterdam Ambulance Service chooses Sepura

Translation of an article that first appeared in the July issue of Verbinding Magazine. 

On 4th June 2003 the C2000 mobile radio network in the Netherlands officially came into service and the municipal ambulance services in Amsterdam became the first public safety service in the Netherlands to fully implement the new digital network for mobile communications. 

Amsterdam Ambulance Service chooses Sepura 

The Central Post Ambulance Transport (CPA), ambulance services in Amsterdam and the surrounding regions is the first to switch to the new C2000 digital network. C2000 replaces the regional analogue radio networks of the ambulance services, fire brigades, police forces and the Royal Military Police with one nationwide digital radio network based on the European TETRA standard. The new system will enable the public safety and emergency services to communicate directly and simultaneously, something which was not possible with the old analogue system. Not only will the new network significantly improve multidisciplinary co-operation, but emergency services will also be able to use extra functionalities such as simultaneous access to their computer databases. 

Critical Assessment

The ambulance personnel of GG&GD and VZA will be using Sepura SRP2000 handportables. The ambulance fleet will be equipped with Sepura SRM1000 mobiles. "We left the choice of peripheral equipment to the ambulance personnel themselves," said Richard Janssen, project co-ordinator C2000 CPA and Ambulance Care. "In the decision process, the ambulance personnel were impressed by the available functions and user friendliness of the Sepura products. For them the small size and the lightweight of the SRP2000 was one of the decisive factors. After all, they will be working with them on a daily basis," added Mr Janssen. Furthermore, the assessment committee considered the user interface of Sepura equipment to be of paramount importance. The screen set-up of both the handportables and the mobiles is similar. "That is relevant because we had to train 400 staff members in one month. Another key advantage of the Sepura terminals is the Transmit Inhibit function, allowing users to put their radios in a receive-only mode, when in RF sensitive areas so contact with the incident room is never interrupted." 

European Standard

TETRA (TErrestrial Trunked RAdio) is the European standard for radio communication of the public safety and emergency services, like GSM is the standard for mobile telephony of the general public. The standard was developed by ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute. This organisation produces the European protocols for mobile telecommunication. TETRA was originally meant to improve border-crossing communication between the police and customs units of the Schengen countries, but countries outside Europe also opted for the standard. In total the system is presently in use in more than fifty countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin-America. Sepura Limited is a major manufacturer of TETRA radios for public safety and emergency services. Sepura is a flexible, medium-sized company with a workforce of more than 100 people. Sepura TETRA terminals are used in 43 countries on TETRA systems of eleven different manufacturers. CPA Amsterdam co-ordinates 101, 000 ambulance call outs per year. That amounts to 400 journeys a day in a service area with 1.4 million inhabitants and 0.5 million commuters. Therefore it is important that the Sepura SRM1000 mobiles were equipped with a Global Positioning System (GPS). "It is a complex area with many incidents. We have to deploy our people as efficiently as possible so that they can reach their destination even faster," said Mr Janssen. "With this number of incidents, Amsterdam is the ideal testing ground for the rest of the Netherlands." Dick Schoof, Director General Public Safety and Emergencies of the Ministry of Interior and Kingdom Affairs commented "It is high time that we equipped our emergency personnel with truly professional and state of the art communication equipment. It was an important recommendation of the committee." Inadequate communication was proven to be the weak link during many incidents in Amsterdam. Many people attempted to phone the emergency services at the same time, causing the public GSM network to overload. Overcrowded lines will no longer be an issue for emergency services, because C2000 is a private radio network, accessible only to the public safety and emergency services. The high-quality system makes use of secured military lines and switching points. Moreover, it is especially dimensioned to deal with disaster incidents. The infrastructure is provided by TetraNed, a co-operation between KPN Telecom and Getronics. The (technical) supervision of the core of the C2000 radio network is executed by ITO, an agency of the Ministry of Interior and Kingdom Affairs. 

Intelligent Sepura software 

The intelligence of the trunking network enables thousands of individual and call groups to coincide on the C2000 network. The maximum number of simultaneous calls on one single mast is dimensioned at nineteen. Up to 800 talk groups can be programmed into the Sepura terminals and the incident room can allocate another twenty, which amounts to a maximum of 820 groups. According to Mr Schoof the implementation of C2000 has many administrative and operational benefits. 25 Integrated incident rooms are planned in regions throughout the Netherlands. Therefore it is important that there is interoperability between the police, the Royal Military Police, fire brigade and ambulance services. Each region will have a single multidisciplinary incident room and during accidents and disasters these incident rooms will become the pivot of all emergency services. Amsterdam is only the beginning. The construction of the network will reach its final phase next year at which point C2000 will be rolled out nationwide. An international pilot is due to start late 2003 in the three-country region near Limburg in the south of the Netherlands, which will connect the Dutch network with the neighbouring TETRA networks of Belgium and Germany. Cross border communications will then become feasible. Sepura terminals have now been approved for use in the Belgian ASTRID network and are being used in the three-country pilot.