Each year UK fire and rescue service attend over 55,000 incidents inside buildings or structures. Incident commanders and fire crews must adapt immediately to a situation using only the information available to them at the time.
Improving situational awareness is therefore absolutely critical to the safety of the lives of the Emergency Services response teams and the general public.
At present, Fire & Rescue Services are unable to communicate or accurately monitor and track a firefighting crew’s location in real-time when they enter buildings.
These fire crews already endure considerable physical and cognitive burden, exaggerated by intense heat and thick disorienting smoke, impairing their situational awareness and decision-making ability.
Providing better real-time operational situation awareness, location reporting and improved communication is therefore paramount to the safety of life and will allow responders to become proactive, enable them to take preventative action ahead of further situations developing and making faster, more informed decisions.
In-building communication is a consistent challenge for Emergency Responders as current in-service personal role radios are only sufficient for voice, and their performance is impaired by building structure and the surrounding environment.
MANET radio systems overcome this challenge by ‘hopping’ from one node to the next providing full-duplex data throughput of up to 100 Mbps, multiple concurrent high-quality voice/talk groups, and distribution of real-time multicast HD video – This technology can be considered a COTS item and hence low risk/high TRL.
A MANET system will provide dependable, immediate real-time situational awareness and clear voice communication where other communications systems have been proven on numerous occasions to be unreliable. Wave Relay® has been proven countless times in dense building and underground environments.
Steatite can offer a Wave Relay® solution which provides a robust and stable communications network that will allow for the passage of voice, data communications, and accurate real-time location data whilst operating in complex buildings and structures, or even underground.
Benefits of the Wave Relay® MANET solution offered by Steatite include;
• Instant deployment of a local area data, voice & video communications network
• In building voice and video communication where typical RF radios cease to work
• Uninterrupted voice communications both inside and outside of buildings
• Location reporting in denied-GPS environments (eg. Subterranean / inside buildings)
• 3D representation of the building layout
• Instantly deployable real-time situational awareness for firefighting crews
• Access to cloud-based services and information
