OK, I'll speak my 2-cents-worth:
1. Of course Moto is being difficult. Why would they want to make is easy for competition to come in with a "just-as-easy-as-the-big-guys" solution? It's good business, and good business is usually controversial because it's rarely good for everyone who's effected. This is similar to mobile phone technologies, in that we have PCS, GSM, TDMA, CDMA, etc. Even when you have several carriers on the same platform (GSM) from which to choose, you have to have your phone "unlocked" to switch carriers and keep the same phone. It's precisely why carriers made the manufacturers lock the phones. They want to make it difficult for the competition to "steal" you away.
2. Protocol, like P25 and ProVoice, is not the complicating element. It's the agencies putting the systems in who complicate interoperability. Standards are made to ease the use of their application in industries. The communications industry is no different. This is why there is a digital standard. If your agency, or others nearby, stray from the standard, you will have problems. In the case of OKC, there are many issues that can and will eventually be solved, but there are a lot of hoops to jump through to make it happen.
3. My biggest issues with OKC's choice:
a. This $24.5 million system was approved because the City appealed to our emotions after Jeff Rominger and Matt Evans were killed in a horrific crash, with the City telling us that this might have been avoided if we only had a radio system that could "talk" to the OHP system. Even though the technology will eventually be in place to allow this communication, it isn't yet in place. As much as I hear now that the reason for the new radio system is to replace our aging system, it wasn't the reason given at the time the tax was proposed. It wasn't the reason I voted for it.
b. Putting aside that complaints about "I can't hear it on my scanner", which really come across as whiny, there is some validity to the complaint. Scanner listeners have contributed to saving lives and property, and have contributed to apprehending suspected criminals. I'm not aware of any reliable statistics that indicate how often this happens, but it does happen. I know, it's happened to me, where I have been able to contribute on more than one occasion.
c. We have several municipalities within and around the city limits, who will be unaware of sometimes-critical events as they happen. Right now, officers on patrol in these towns, like Bethany, Warr Acres, Nichols Hills, The Village, etc. can still hear an OKC officer give the description of a suspect vehicle. That's time-critical information, and can easily be heard right now with scanner that most of those officers can purchase, and some do out of their own pockets, rather cheaply. When the VHF links go down, that information will take much longer to get to that same officer's ears, which could make the difference in whether or not that suspect is caught. It scares me that those tasked with selecting our radio system did not take this into consideration, and in fact admitted to that when this scenario was mentioned at a recent meeting with various agencies in attendance.
d. With the TCBs and various patches, I'm concerned that there are too many things that can break. No radio system is immune from going down, but shouldn't we try to limit all the additional elements needed to make the system what it should be?
e. This point goes right back to placing the blame where it should be, on the shoulders of the agency. Most users, in fact I would bet with very few exceptions, know that there are NPSPAC in place which they can use if the EDACS system goes down. It was just a couple weeks ago that I listened while FD and PD dispatchers could only communicate with officers who had VHF radios. Why haven't we trained the users of these two critical agencies that they should switch to an NPSPAC channel when the system goes down? This seems to be such a "no-brainer". It might have been covered in an initial training class, but it obviously wasn't addressed properly. I've made a point to talk to several officers and firefighters who haven't a clue that these repeaters exist, or how to access them, or that they have those channels in their radios already.
The comment has been made here that Oklahoma City had to make the right decision for Oklahoma City. The glaring opposite position is that there isn't anything that could not also have been accomplished with an industry-standard protocol. Why buy a proprietary system? If the answer to that is money, shame on those who let that be the criteria. If the answer is that some of these things weren't considered, shame on those who let someone make this kind of decision who obviously didn't know what they were doing. If the answer is something else, I'd like to hear it. Maybe the answer is just poor planning. God knows I've been guilty of that, but it's usually when I don't seek out, or listen to the advice of people who know more than I do.
