Working in close collaboration with IT Communications at MAG, Radiocoms managed the deployment in its entirety, from proposed design, to site surveys, rack positioning, architecture requirements, to redundancy elements and full documentation. The system was built, tested and signed off at Radiocoms’ offices in Heathrow, before being transported to Stansted for storage while the system was rolled out smoothly, and with no loss of service. The analogue and digital systems ran in parallel during transition. 13 MOTOTRBO SLR 5500 repeaters were installed at four sites within the airport canopy, with the primary rack positioned in the main office building, Enterprise House. The system is designed to ensure radio coverage across the whole site, including far runways, cargo areas and outlying carparks, and within a 1.6 km (1-mile) radius beyond the airport’s perimeter. The complex infrastructure comprises numerous elements such as the Capacity Max System Server (CMSS) and IP network switches, routers, gateway servers and RMS servers.

Users were equipped with MOTOTRBO DP4801e portable two-way radios, with 30 MOTOTRBO DM4601e fixed mobile two-way radios used as desk radios and a further 60 DM4601e units being installed in-vehicle; departments can also order accessories such as earpieces and remote speaker microphones (RSMs) to meet their specific requirements. 51 talk groups were set up across 21 departments, including airside security, baggage, airfield operations, landside operations, terminal facilities and in-store teams, for example, so all Stansted airport employees can communicate over the network. Departments and sub-departments can decide how best to organise and manage their talk group and each has a primary channel for that group, but they can also have access to other relevant talk groups on request, for example the customer experience group can also communicate with security and terminal facilities.

There are also three dedicated priority level “Inform” channels that are programmed into every single radio, and are only used in the event of a widespread incident, such as a fire or a security alert. As well as the airport employees, Radicoms also manages the network for 250 third-party commercial users such as employees of major airlines, ground handlers, transport companies, builders and concessions, who have started communicating over the network. In view of the potential scale and capacity of the network, it is expected that further commercial users will be migrated onto the platform in the future. Stansted has a comprehensive maintenance agreement with Radiocoms, who has a dedicated airport team of four specialist engineers; the team has access to Service Now, MAG’s ticketing platform, and works to strict SLAs: infrastructure downtime response within two hours, fix within four hours and a 5-day radio repair turnaround. This agreement is backed up with Motorola Solutions premier services package, which covers the initial deployment and subsequent incremental orders.