Telent deliver station end refresh for Avon Fire & Rescue Service in preparation for ESN transition

Headquartered in Portishead and with 21 fire stations across the area, Avon FRS’s 500 Wholetime firefighters, 120 on-call firefighters, 35 control room personnel and 120 support staff, responded to over nine thousand incidents in 2021.

In addition, the organisation’s fire coders – the core hardware technology that mobilise crews – needed to be upgraded as they approached end-of-life. A fire coder is the intelligent device at each fire station that is at the heart of Telent’s station end solution. It receives information from the control room, via the primary bearer (or secondary bearer if there is an issue with the primary bearer) to operate multiple devices to directly mobilise resources in the fire station.

The equipment activated by the fire coders includes printers in the station and Mobile Data Terminals in the fire appliances, both receiving critical information about the incident. A wide range of other devices are also activated in the fire station to mobilise crews, including radio paging for retained stations and control relays to flash lights, open doors and turn off cookers. It was therefore essential that Avon FRS remained connected via a replacement system for Paknet and was utilising the most up-to-date, supported and secure operating systems.

As part of the full-service offering, Telent provided comprehensive design, testing and deployment services. This started with initial development and pilot testing of the solution in its specialised lab followed by prestaging all equipment to minimise time on site and maximise quality of service for the main project deployment. The pre-staging of equipment in Telent’s secure facilities included testing and fully configuring all equipment to reduce any early-life failures and associated on-site engineering visits.

The new router solution is equipped with a cloud management application that provides secure remote monitoring that can be conducted on behalf of the customer. Telent can administer new change configurations centrally and across all of Avon’s 21 stations via the secure cloud platform. The cloud management solution also has the ability to directly monitor and alert Telent’s network operations centre should any issues be detected.

The system upgrade and end-to-end replacement of the legacy back-up network provides critical station end communications to Avon FRS. Importantly, the network refresh supported Avon FRS’ station end systems and prepared the organisation’s mobilisation solution for ESN compatibility.