So far Mikescan, and others have been proven wrong on their attempt to curtail milwaukee's OPEN-SKY communucation system, as it still continues to be deployed. Yet he accuses others, of providing useless information, as he does.. If his assertions were correct OPEN-SKY, would never have reached this stage of development as it has.
Curtail Milwaukee's OpenSky system ? Unless I am mistaken, I don't think we (RR users) teamed up and stormed city board meetings or police union meetings trying to "curtail" your system.
However, when the system users have made comments about the system not meeting the needs for them, then yea...people are going to complain.
Then you throw in the never ending delays. Myself and 4 of the other radio techs I work with have built 3 wide area county wide radios systems during the past 6+ years Milwaukee have been jerked around by M/A Com. This includes consoles, voters, microwave, P25, encrypted, simulcast, etc. Yet, even with large systems we never ran into 6 + year delays. Hrmmm.
Reputable radio providers bidding on a government job normally have to abide by some type of performance bond. Basically, a promise to meet the project time requirements.
You DO NOT just send in a salesperson into a city director and sell a system. I can not quote the laws on this, but I am pretty sure there are laws in place for the proper handling of government jobs like this where vendors have to go through the whole bidding process, bonds, insurance, performance bonds..etc. Also a system like this is NEVER NEVER done without hiring a public safety communications consultant.
Who was the consultant that spec'd the Milwaukee system ? That, Tencom, is a direct question. Since you have the inside scoop, perhaps you'd like to answer that. Once that consultant's name gets out, he will have no more work in WI.
My first experience as a RADIO TECH with a consultant was rather sour. However as the project panned out, I learned that consultants are a GOOD thing. They protect the customer from being screwed over, and they actually help the vendor quite a bit. If a consultant draws up system spec's wrong, and the vendor builds per the spec....the consultant is stuck with dealing with the mess (this has happened before). Some consultants are better than others, but the majority I have worked with have been pretty decent.
Interoperability ? Yea, within the users of the system. Those outside of it are dark. Sure, one can setup a console patch, but as an experienced console tech...they don't work as great as you'd think they do. Unless you can get a hard COR signal to the console (and the console supports it), it will be VOX activated in both directions, and yup....first or second syllables will be cut off....just about every time. Also dropouts on pauses in sentences causing the analog system to re-key, and don't forget the tone controlled keyup delay times. Milwaukee chose to buy a system that was proprietary, so they must live with that. They basically gave the finger to the surrounding agencies. This is no different from NEXTEDGE or TURBO. Sure, they have their place in commercial/business world, but not in public safety. When a radio vendor sells a proprietary system to a public safety user, that's just greed. Local governments and county governments should have the right to buy whatever subscriber units they like. When you lock them into one brand, that's bad...real bad.
It seems to me some very poor choices were made in the beginning. Was the project out on a RFP ? Was there a consultant ? Performance bonds ?
I am still amazed Tencom, that you still preach about how great this is, and how right you are, yet the amount of FAIL has far outweighed the amount of WIN. (If you don't know about FAIL/WIN, Google it).
So let's see Tencom...you say this is a major win for you. Let's discuss this for a moment .
Phase 1 - Data
Phase 2 - Police
Phase 3 - Fire/EMS
Phase 4 - Others
Right now it seems to me that Phase 2 is now complete, Feb 2010. The PD has switched to the OpenSky system.
So when the Fire/EMS units switch to it 100%, then we can say phase 3 is complete. Um, the FD is not switched over to it according to what I have read.
So that brings the score up to, Phase 1 & 2 is done. Only 6+ years, and it's half done. Yea, that's a real victory.
So Tencom, how much longer will Harris still make/support the OpenSky radios ? With pitiful sales, they must know this a dog of a product.
Motorola has done the same with Smartnet. It was a *HELL* of a good trunking format, reliable, and did the job nicely. Even Motorola said, "you know, we had a good run with it, lets move on to something else." That something else is P25 trunking. Now, Motorola killed off smartnet, not because it was a sick dog like OpenSky, but because it ran it's life cycle. OpenSky never it made it to the "successful" mark. When will Harris realize this is a money loser and kill it off ? I bet sooner than you think, then Milwaukee will be stuck with a system that is obsolete due to parts being NLA. It's obsolete now due to Analog/P25 being the two standards in public safety formats. Imagine when Harris kills it off.
I am sure Harris wants to move forward with VOIP technology, perhaps there was a component in the OpenSky protocol they wanted, and bought M/A Com for it ? If Harris re-engineers their VOIP idea, and come out with something better, does that mean OpenSky hardware/infrastructure can change with it ? We don't know. But, I'd be laughing if they had to change all the hardware out to work with some new format Harris may be working on.
I have asked you some pretty direct questions Tencom, if you could please answer them accordingly.
