Posts by Graham 25

Re: Airwave might be more expensive than a sim only third party carrier contract

"Why is a public body a ridiculous notion?"

Because its full of people not remotely competent enough to get a job with responsibility in the private sector - and nobody in the public sector is ever held liable for their mistakes. Its full of people who are lazy and incompetent. Look at any service provided by the public sector and every single one of them fails and fails and fails and never learns. A public body is largely unaccountable, incapable of taking action quuickly without a forest of Sir Humphreys wanting paper by the tonne - and thats before politics even rears its ugly head. The whole organisation is stuck in the 19th century.

TETRA never delivered - because it was supposed to offer an upgrade path to data - and never did. the idea of TATRA was interoperability across networks, That never really happened as HMG took so long that the supplier base ceased to exist. If lighting were left to the public sector, large swathes of the country would still have gas lamps. Handsets are ridiculously expensive because they arent a mass production item. After nearly 35 years,, you still cant get TETRA underground in London, despite the demands of Kings Cross Enquiry in 1988

Its not about authority, although I do agree about the ever changing requirements. The problem is the piblic sector is way too slow at everything it does and whats worse, the staff wouldnt go any faster even if given the authority. The staff are basically useless in a modern environment.

Re: Talent is highly concentrated (and not cheap)

At least with the private sector, if they are bad, they lose money and go out of business.

We get the privilege of paying extra for the public sector to put right its f -Ups

So how come there are all these public sector failures with private sector delivery contracts

Answer : becauise its still got the public sector in there stopping or delaying everything with interminable changes and failures on GFE/GFI.

i read somewhere, there are zero qualified, real engineers in Parliament. Nothing from the IMechE, ICE or IET

Not sure if its true though

Re: Airwave might be more expensive than a sim only third party carrier contract

"It really shouldn't be a private company beholden to foreign debt manufacturers."

At the time Airwave started ( prior to that it started out as the Public Sector Radio Communications Project), there was only a single UK TETRA manufacturer - Phillips/Pye which became Simoco in Cambridge. The alternatives were Nokia and Motorola.

The UK government had exactly zero idea on how to design, deliver or maintain anationwide network, so any suggestion that the public sector could do any of that is laughably stupid.

In the end, the HMG procurement process ground on, and Motorola were selected primarity as neither Simoco or Nokia were prepared to put up with the bizarre drivel from HMG procurement on commercial terms or delivery demands.

Simoco went out of business despite some great systems deals with ambulance services and Nokia had enough of HMg and wouldnt sell in the UK to the public sector.

And as we know, TETRA never really delivered and the 3G auctions stripped all the invetment capital out fo the comms market for almost a decade with billions straight to HMG and the UK comms base destroyed when by bought foreign across the board.

I was in a meeting with Motorola and a certain branch of HMG over a large radio project where we had designed a rather specialised system exclusively for certain *Cough Cough* UK services, and of course the UK gov't wanted to pay a fraction of the price that the system cost so were trying to strong arm Motorola into committing private development resource to the project o drop the price - despite the fact that the system wouyld never be permitted to be sold to anyone else.

Literally, to the HMG negotiating teams faces, our team including Motorola laughed at them and told them they were just being stupid (not silly, but actually stupid). The client was shocked and before they could start blustering, the Motorola VP got out one of the new Motorola Startac mobiles which was the latest hot potato in small mobile flip-phones, and plonked it on the table. He told them that the people part of the development effort for that handset was half of the development effort they were asking Motorola to spend, on a system with about 25 handsets and a few replacements a year. The VP told them they can get that contract revenue in the mobile phone shops on Oxfprd Street in December and January so they are being stupid if they think that makes a good business case for anyone. I always recall that meeting as it was the first time I had seen a negotiator walk away from HMG and tell them they werent worth the hassle, and to shove their order.

The project died at the Project Definition phase and was never implemented. As it turned out, Motorola made the absolutely right decision, as the Good Friday Agreement resulted in all sorts of things being cancelled and this one would have been at the top of the list had it proceeded at any price.

There is no UK base on the technology front for Airwave, and the public sector cant do sh*t on anything remotely technical, and when it comes to service delivery, can anyone seriously suggest the morons who deliver HMRC services could do a safety critical network like Airwave ? Public Sector procurement really isnt worth the hassle these days.

"The law must state that essential components(display, biometrics, speaker, camera, battery, charge port, etc.) need to be separate and individually replaceable. This is in addition to all other parts and components being able to be replaced, with the total cost of all parts being unable to exceed launch month price."

Now the crazies are getting really hot under the collar. back to housebrick phones then ?

I love it when the economically illiterate try to make such decisions. the et effect will be a vast increase in prices and nobody will be able to. buy them, and companies will fold. And No, alternatives will not spring up because nobody wants the pay the price of the nirvana driven craziness.

Re: A good start, but ...

These kind of suggestions are all very well and good, but the net effect will be to completely destroy any new product innovation and make everything vastly more expensive.

So you come up with a new mobile technology which could make battery life better - can you guarantee it will be reparable in 10 years if you release it now, and can be sure something better doesnt come along making it obsolete - No, so forget releasing it because you are saddled with supporting that clunky old technology which is killing your company. You are now running your entire company at least one generation behind every otehr competitor, and you will be bankrupt quickly and support goes to zero.

Sure - something needs to be done about short life washing machines or John Deere tractors but dragging it down into high tech consumables, for which the vast majority of people change their devide every couple of years anyway, is like the enemy of good, being perfection.

All that will happen when the crazies tyr to get perfection is a handset will be released, and the support will last only as long as the company exists. It will be shut down, and the next 'generation' of phone will be released by a new company with no ties to the earlier company.

Too many naive, optimistic, economically illiterate people trying to get the perfect solution and like so many EU ideas, it will over-reach, compromise and come up with something of very little practical use.

Re: For UK residents

Federal Charges - no early release allowed.

Re: So?

I have to assume you have never met anyone from the UK Public Sector on any kind of project as they really are utterly useless at everything.

Definitely the scrapings at the bottom of the barrel, arguably the barrel material itself.

Re: Not yet noted

Its not suspect as she never actually met any patients herself and never made any promises to them directly.

Re: I'm not defending any of them... but I'm not sure "scam" is right???

A company - which never produced any audited accounts.

A working lab - nope - it failed FDA approvals and was shut down. She even hired lab directors and kept them out of the lab and threatened them with legal action when they threatened to go public. Not mentioned in the trial as the judge would not allow it, was the one internationally credible lab director who said it was a scam, and unreliable so she sacked him, had him hounded by lawyers and private investigators - until the chap committed suicide. the lab was not full of her machine but of modified third party machines which were used outside of their approved capabilities.

A research and a product development division - not - it never delivered a working device. Anyone who threatened to tell all was attacked by lawyers,.

...... and a product - as you say, they delivered nothing working.

She did a runner with the money every year - several corporate jets and massive personal expenses - not the actions of an entrepreneur trying to make a company success but of one bleeding a company dry of investment while refusing to show its books.

Re: But, she did do one good thing

they did plenty of due diligence - unfortunately someone was faking documents, faking contracts and relationships and press announcements and that person was Elizabeth Homes - she personally did all the underhand stuff and didnt even try to get others to do it.

Re: Sentencing will be interesting

The ABC Podcast 'the Dropout' gives a very in-depth view of what she was doing over about 23 episodes of listening

Re: Feel odd

"Big tech avoids a lot of tax and many countries are justifiably angry about that"

Those countries being the ones where the company doesnt pay the tax but pays it in anotehr jurisdiction.

The problem with all this bleating from countries is that if they start that game, other countries will start to target their multinationals to strip taxes out of what they get now and they will find everyone in the world will want a piece of their hime grown companies.

Re: even if in Apple's case it's really just a fruit emblem

"you have about 5 seconds to pick it up before the Mac and the iPad start ringing as well which causing a right din as they all start bleating for attention."

So why didnt you just disable the 'Calls on other devices' feature ?

Re: Should have been designed into or alongside GSM-R

GSM-R was/is only made by two suppliers - Siemens and Ericsson. the rest quite rightly concluded it was commercially non-viable and a waste of development time.

To be fair, Railtrack did ask the UK operators to quote for it to be installed on WCML but they all declined as the cost was too high and Railtrack only wanted to pay 'on use' and as the operators could generate more revenues on Oxford Street in a day that the WCML would generate in a year, it was a complete non-starter. I know this as I was there.

The main reason why its a problem is the nice, metal laminated windows on the trains and the lack of available inter-carriage connections. You might stick an aerial on one carriage but you cannot route RF through the carriages on the inside very easily, so you're stuck with putting aerials on the top of the train right next to the second biggest source of RF interference where the power lines run parallel with the train.

And as GSM-R is a safety critical system, theres no way anyone on the safety side is going to allow the two infrastructures to join up.

GSM-R was certainly only built for 3G at best on WCML as the good old whining public didnt want to pay for Railtrack to straighten out the curves and lift the track to ground level to speed up journeys and as a result make it better RF coverage from existing towers.