Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

263
 
Progress beyond the state-of-the-art
• It is likely to be very expensive to re-engineer commercial networks to achieve 
all the public safety sector’s operational requirements, and there are questions 
about whether sufficient incentives exist for commercial operators to do this. 
For example, typical requirements include the need for battery back-up to be 
available at thousands of base station sites across the network, and for networks 
to be designed to ensure that they are highly resilient (including overlapping 
coverage, standby power supplies and fall-back sites) and that no single “point 
of failure” exists either in access or core networks.
• There is the view that commercial networks might be more vulnerable to 
sabotage by criminals than dedicated networks are.
• There are questions about whether the required Grade of Service for PPDR use 
can be guaranteed within a network shared with commercial users, particularly 
in times of very high traffic loading; and whether some PPDR requirements are 
actually achievable in this network.
• There are conflicting views on whether signaling could be encrypted over air 
interface in 3G/LTE.
• Ensuring the specific requirements of carriage of “restricted” or “confidential” 
documents requires careful network planning and approvals, which is complex 
and costly to achieve.
• It is not clear that networks can be dimensioned to achieve the required 
immediacy and guaranteed access that PPDR requires.
• There is reluctance for public bodies to be reliant on fully commercial operators, 
in view of the potential lack of control upon future network investment, business 
plans and financing.
However, as explained before, the current (and possibly, future) dedicated PMR net-
work (TETRA) would not be able to cope with the trend for current and future PPDR 
mobile high speed data and multimedia applications that is being foreseen to cover 
a range of needs.