Actually, you arent asking permission to use the system each time you purchase a radio. Prior to the current situation, where there are simply no more available ID's to add radios, agencies that already arranged with VIPER to identify talk groups for their use simply sent in a request to add a radio, received the ID back from the state and the radios were activated. What a system like VIPER (or any other trunked radio system that is managed) does provide however, is a way for agencies to be able to manage who has access to their talk groups (effectively their channels) and prevents someone from just going out and buying a radio, as was the case in legacy systems (VHF/UHF), whereby programming it up and then commencing to talk. Coming from someone who has seen this first hand, outside of my "day job", its frankly a good thing in many cases since it prevents people that you DONT want talking on your channel from doing so.
As an aside, as we move into the next stage of VIPER with the transition mid year to P25, we are actually putting more emphasis on providing the counties with greater control over who has access to the system at the county level. The new process will provide a block of P25 ID's to each county for them to administer and assign as they see fit (within the agreement that the counties have with VIPER) and all we will do is act as the "turn on/turn off" mechanism for radios on the system. If the county doesnt support someone having a radio on VIPER and their talk groups, the decision as to who can and cant will come from the county level than from us. As we have seen over the past ten years, there are plenty of situations where the counties dont want certain people on the system and they are more likely to know who those folks are than VIPER is.
M