Let's not get carried away with the hyperbole.
The 700 MHz Air-Ground system, which has been on the air for nearly 8 years now, has 30 repeaters total (10 sites with 3 repeaters each). Back in 2013, a Harris P25 FDMA trunking capable repeater was probably in the ballpark of $20,000 to $25,000, so we're talking about $600,000 to $750,000 total for those 30 repeaters, not "millions". The rest of the infrastructure like the tower structures and microwave was basically already in place for any co-located OpenSky sites.
So now they're likely going to fold some or all of those sites into the larger ASTRO 25 TDMA system, which requires IP connected Motorola GTR8000 repeaters. So the Harris repeaters had their days numbered anyway, because to be frank the commonwealth is done with Harris and has moved on from the whole OpenSky debacle. With a fully functional Motorola ASTRO 25 core, there is no point in maintaining a separate Harris core, especially when having everything on a single core provides the highest degree of compatibility and seamless networking...no need for an ISSI connection between systems. Obviously the tower structures, antennas, microwave links, etc. can all be reused, so there's no waste there.
Yes, all of this comes at some cost, but after the nearly $1 billion they've sunk into the OpenSky system over the past 20 years, upgrading the Air-Ground system is chump change and well worth the investment to bring those sites up to date. Or to maybe get rid of some, yes, because there's certainly nothing wrong with realizing that some of the existing sites of the ASTRO 25 system will provide equal or better coverage than the Harris 700 sites currently provide. The Air-Ground system was never intended as a backup to OpenSky, and certainly not to the ASTRO 25 system, which has quite a bit of redundancy already factored in. That system was a band-aid to allow the aircraft to communicate with ground units, as the OpenSky system is even worse in the air than it is on the ground.
So yeah...its time has come, time to move ahead with a unified system.
