Fire and Rescue Service

The Communities and Local Government has awarded Airwave the contract to replace the legacy mobile communications systems used by fire and rescue services throughout England. The Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly have awarded the contract for Scotland and Wales respectively.

When delivery is complete in 2009, the Airwave service will be instrumental in helping to achieve the Government’s vision of joined up communications between all the organisations concerned with public safety.

When the Airwave service is fully operational in 2009, fire and rescue services will be able to take advantage of a number of important operational benefits, including:

• Enhanced geographical coverage
• Inherent resilience
• Radio interoperability
• Exceptionally clear speech quality
• Far greater calling flexibility
• Security
• Sufficient network capacity

Training is a critical part of the rollout 

A call-off catalogue has been produced to allow Fire and Rescue Services to order additional products and services outside of the core items supplied as part of the Firelink contract, under pre-negotiated terms and conditions.