Besides all the political reasons preventing a statewide network is the vast terrain of California. Different frequencies work better in different areas. For example, in a heavily wooded, hilly terrain, you'd need lower frequencies than wide-open spaces. In an urban environment, lower frequencies don't work well... the higher the better (to a point, obviously). You may be able to set up a network that covers the majority of POPULATED California, but the price would be rediculously expensive to cover ALL of California adequately.... unless you went satellite, and then you'd have issues with indoor transmission. They'd need a lot of mobile repeaters and some terrestrial repeaters too. That would be very expensive.
Now, if they DID build a statewide network... using a network similar to iDEN or MIRS, I doubt they could run out of talkgroups. This would allow each unit to be individually addressed and grouped. I'm sure that if the State of California was going to invest in such a system, manufacturers would bend over backwards to setup a system that would work just like most USERS would like. I'd think it would be more like a cellphone network rather than traditional trunked radios and all of us would be out of luck trying to listen to it with any scanner because ALL users would be encrypted. The root of such a network would be each radio has it's own ID address. The whole thing will be managed by networked computers. Each radio can individually reach any other radio, if you know their number, but when it comes to "channels", they are managed by the dispatchers. They can create unlimited amount of channels. It's kind of like these forums, you can create as many of these forums on the internet as the imagination of people will allow. In practical useage, a city would set up a list of STANDARD channels and each radio under the local communications center would be programmed with what ever channels they wish them to have access to. For example, a street sweeper's radio will only be able to transmit on their city public works group of channels. Should they TRUELY have a need to communicate on a channel that all the police are talking amounst themselves on, then the police dispatch supervisor can temporarily give access for that radio to talk on their channel.
It's all a possibility... nothing is impossible. No new technology really needs to be invented for this to occur... should you have the money. It is just prohibitively expensive.
