Birmingham City University deploys MOTOTRBO™ radios for enhanced campus management and staff safety.
Birmingham City University (BCU) has more than 25,000 students and 3,000 staff, spread across 5 sites covering 96 square km of Birmingham. With the development of a new £180 million City Centre Campus supporting 18,000 students and the accessibility the planned HS2 train project represents, the University wanted a future-proof communication system to match its current and increasing needs.
For the past 10 years, the BCU used an analogue radio system which offered only limited capabilities. The University had outgrown the system which was suffering from coverage issues, and the base station and handset failures. BCU believed that the safety and security of all students and employees were being compromised and needed a robust communication solution that would support the next stage of The University’s development. BCU wanted the ability to manage all campus activities and events safely and securely, with the knowledge that the radio system was supporting their efforts and providing a duty of care to its workforce with the features it employs.
Concluding BCU’s tender process, Andrew Markou, Assistant Director of Campus Management & Services, said: “With such a major investment, we were looking for a company that could deliver a future-proof system that met our needs for quality and coverage, across all sites, at a competitive price. Appointing Radiocoms Systems Limited, coverage and propagation checks across all the main campus sites, including the City Centre Campus area under development were completed.”
Radiocoms recommended a MOTOTRBO™ Digital Radio System to achieve the coverage, clarity and system capabilities BCU desired. Mark Blythe, Radiocoms’ Managing Director said: “ The MOTOTRBO system offered the best equipment to meet all BCU’s requirements, with a mixture of MOTOTRBO DP400e hand portables for the majority of users and the MOTOTRBO SL4000 for senior management members who wanted a discrete radio unit that provided all major functions.”
Meeting the demands of a modern campus.
BCU had a good understanding of a digital radio system’s capabilities and so features such as telephone interconnect, text messaging, ‘lone-worker’, GPS tracking and remote ‘device stun & kill’ was high on its list of requirements. Given multi-faceted demands, Radiocoms designed a system that satisfies the features requested by the seven different departments, including Security, Campus Services, Health & Safety, Student Union, Estates, Accommodation Services and Media; in addition to the provision of the common Emergency Channel requirements.
New ways of working for all the team.
Historically, the monitoring of staff was a manual process. Combining communication paths during site incidents was difficult because individual department communications were separated. The new digital radio system now automatically tracks its resources, with every radio being fitted with a GPS unit. The information is displayed on computers at key locations.
With the use of MOTOTRBO, vulnerable workers are now automatically supported. They will then be automatically called on a timed cycle, checking on their well being without requiring an operator’s intervention. The software application creates an auto-escalation process and alarms are initiated should there be no response. This gives peace of mind to all users.
MOTOTRBO radio system gives outstanding performance.
During an open day more than 14,000 visitors attend the BCU site to see the facilities. The challenges are enormous with the coordination of car parking, student ambassadors, and security patrols looking after the well being of visitors. Security Operations Manager, Asif Zahoor said: “The new communication system was brilliant.”
This has been reflected in BCU’s subsequent healthy student intake. But the biggest single change that Radiocoms has delivered with the MOTOTRBO solution is ‘clarity’ in the communication performance.