A failure of any type is still a failure. Grossly overpriced radios is one of the issues that some agencies are still using the legacy radios. What many fail to understand is that while P25 is a pretty cool set up, the cost of the radios is keeping many agencies, especially smaller locals, from being able to access these systems. There is a limited amount of grant money out there, and public safety agencies have a lot of demands they have to meet with a limited budget.
This is sort of like tearing up all the roads in a state, building brand new ones, and then requiring anyone who wants to drive on a road, no matter if its an ambulance, fire truck, police car, etc, to purchase a brand new car that just happens to cost 5 times the cost of the older, but perfectly usable car they were using before.
Yes, we need to upgrade public safety radio systems. Yes, P25 might be the answer today, but likely that will change in the next 10 years when these agencies will be required to buy all new equipment again.
12.5KHz analog VHF is pretty dang interoperable, and I can buy 2 to 3 very good radios for the price of one P25 radio, and many more for the price of a p25 multi band radio. Not saying that these high end systems are wrong, I'm saying that we need to be realistic about our expectations. One of the biggest issues we have is user training. I feel that a lot of the interoperability issues could be solved with better user training, rather than trying to solve the issue with high priced radios.
Nomex suit on, flame away....