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Dagfinn Sjøvik adds: “I’m not sure to what extent it’s applicable in other countries, but this project crosses lines inside different ministries. Also, in Norway you have crossovers between state and municipal responsibilities. “The municipalities in Norway, they take their own decisions based on their budget. They have to go on to the network – and of course there will be discussions on this with 430–440 municipalities, making sure of the setup of the project with the right mandate, who decides what on behalf of whom. If you answer those questions, you are well off!” “I also think that it has been very important to try to educate the decision-makers”, Mr Lyngstøl says. “So we have been in meetings in Parliament with standing committees at the beginning – the standing committee of law and order and police and so on. But now it’s in the standing committee of communication and transportation. It has taken such a long time that there have been several ministers, several governments, several parliaments and two different committees within the parliament. So I think it’s important to really understand how you can get decisions. And of course it’s good to have some friends!” From an engineering standpoint, Dagfinn advises: “If you do this over again, offering a new project, make sure that you are not biting off too much at the beginning. The steps need to be something fairly easy to start. And focus on the basics. Introduce functionality in steps.” In the real worldFeedback from surveys of Nødnett users on the ground has been positive, with a widespread welcome for the system’s clear voice quality, better radio coverage, and its potential for improved personal safety for officers and co-operation between agencies. But while the Step 2 deployment ramps up, DNK has also been taking a close look at the network data for July 22, to see what lessons can be drawn about the management and use of the system. “All the people that are working with training here, they have got really to push forward now because everybody understands that this takes some learning”, says Tor Helge Lyngstøl. “And I think this may be the key focus area, to learn how to use this network in stress situations. Because they have tried it now, real world. Many people died. “Could the police have been on this island,Utøya, a quarter earlier? That could have saved 20 young people’s lives. This is a big discussion. I think that we have taken quite a giant leap forward in Norway now when it comes to understanding the importance of such a network and the importance about learning how to utilize it. “In earlier days, there was much more focus on what I call the day-to-day use of the network. Then we talked high data rates and so on. But I think the focus has moved. This is now an emergency network and we need to know how to use it, because we never know when the next time is. “And we that are responsible for this, we really feel this responsibility because we have all the user agencies on this system. It can’t fail. If this system fails, they have nothing. Of course, they can use DMO locally, we can go to fallback base station functionality – but thank God that it worked very well on July 22. It was really one of the things that worked.” Attracting sharersFor a large network spread out over Norway’s thin population, usage by the emergency services alone will not be sufficient to justify the huge cost of construction. So it up to marketing manager Jostein Hesthammer to recruit other bodies with a public service role as future sharers of the network. “We are trying to bring in health, fire and police at the same time”, he explains. “So, in a way, we have a good starting point from the customer point of view, that we have the biggest organizations in Norway with us from the start. Many networks around the world have started as a police network and then tried to bring in the other ones. “I think we have the capacity in the network such that we can bring in other customers. We need to plan for that. We also think that the return to society would benefit from us managing to attract other organizations. These thoughts must be similar all around, where they have a nationwide system. “The challenge now is that so far we only have one out of six phases that we have built. So the customers we will be trying to attract now are in the areas where we have built. That limits us geographically and it limits us also in which organizations we are talking to. On the other hand, some of the organizations we would like to bring in have a rather long cycle to get the funding and the money to be part of the network.
“Some of the challenges we see are that the users would like to select radio terminals themselves, which has not been the case so far in the roll-out of the project. We need to establish better routines for offering equipment like this. We need some kind of recognition of certain brands and models so that we at least know what is entering our network.
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