Opinion please – A case of emergency

The promise back when C2000 was first introduced was that communication difficulties between the various emergency services would now be a thing of the past. But after numerous incidents, including the recent out-of-control rioting at a dance party in Hoek van Holland, the reality turns out to be quite different. The Dutch television documentary program, Zembla, claimed during a broadcast last Sunday that the main problem with C2000 is its coverage.

Dr. Anthony Lo, of the EEMCS faculty’s wireless mobile communication group, supports this claim. Lo: “There are approximately 5,000 GSM base stations deployed in the Netherlands by mobile operators, in order to provide nationwide coverage. A base station is a radio mast that allows for wireless communications. Presently, the C2000 system has deployed about 500 base stations. Of course, the C2000 system can do with less capacity than the GSM network because it is used by less people, but apparently the current capacity just isn’t enough.”

Why then this system? Would it not have been easier to simply have used GSM technology? “The C2000 system is similar to GSM, but it uses a different frequency band that is reserved for emergency usage,” Lo explains. “C2000 therefore needs its own base stations, as it wouldn’t be a good idea to use the same frequency and stations as the regular GSM network, because there are times when there are just too many people on this network, resulting in capacity problems. On New Years Eve, or during important soccer matches, for example, it can be very difficult to reach people on your cellular phone. You wouldn’t want the emergency services to be unable to connect to each other.”

Of course this problem is the same as the one C2000 now faces on its own network. A simple solution for this would be to erect more C2000 base stations. “That might work,” Lo says, “but these stations are quite expensive, and they cost lots of money to maintain.” Users of the C2000 system also report an additional problem: the signal is often very weak inside buildings. According to Lo, this can also be easily solved, using signal boosters. But again, there’s money involved.

“The problem is not the technology – it’s the cost,” says safety expert, professor Ben Ale, of the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management. “But this is nothing new; we’ve known about it for years. Back when the network was put up, it was decided that it could only cost a certain amount of money. We knew that would lead to limitations.” Ale warns that it might prove difficult to get the system to work properly in the case of a national disaster. “But incidents like the one at Hoek van Holland, and other recent incidents in which the media reported C2000’s failings, can hardly be called national disasters,” he adds. “They are moderate disasters, at best. C2000 should function just fine in cases like these, and in my opinion the system should be extended so that it can handle such situations. And I don’t believe that would be too expensive.”

 

TU Delft student Iñaki Merino Albaina successfully defended his Master’s thesis on persuading elderly people to exercise more using pervasive technology. Albaina developed a ‘virtual coach’ called ‘Flowie: A Persuasive Virtual Coach to Motivate Elderly Individuals to Walk’, which involves a step counter with a wireless connection to a screen at home that lets elderly people see at a glance whether they have been active enough over the course of the day.