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Resilient Telecommunications

Enhancing the resilience of communications

Some guiding principles for enhancing the resilience of communications

Look beyond the technical solutions at processes and organisations. When considering resilient telecommunications considerable emphasis tends to be placed on the technical solutions (such as pagers or mobile telephones). However, the processes used in communicating (such as agreed protocols that make conference calls work smoothly) and the way in which responders organise themselves to respond to emergencies should command equal attention and recognition that none of these three components should be considered in isolation. There is no silver bullet to enhancing the resilience of communications.

Identify and review the critical communication activities that underpin your response arrangements. In order to focus the selection of technical solutions on the need to communicate it can be helpful to indentify the critical communication activities that underpin response arrangements to emergencies. An 'activity' is essentially 'what you do' (for example, it could involve a designated person establishing contact with another designated person and exchanging particular information). Critical activities are those that are essential to the effectiveness of response arrangements. For these activities, the focus can be maintained on the need to communicate by assessing the basic 'technology free' communication requirements (such as sending or receiving specific information rather than just 'phoning someone). For further advice see Towards Achieving Resilient Telecommunications: Interim Guidance [PDF, 8 pages, 163KB].

Ensure diversity of your technical solutions. For critical activities, the technological means to carry out the communication can then be considered with the objective of increasing overall telecommunications diversity. However, it can be difficult to assess how truly diverse technical solutions are because of the inherent dependency of one technical solution on another. For example, all public land mobile networks are dependent on core communications networks (that deliver land-line telephone services) - failure or degradation of core networks will affect mobile services. Further information on our telecommunications networks can be found in An introduction to the structure of UK telecommunications sector [PDF, 257KB, 33 pages].

Adopt layered fall-back arrangements. No technical solution is going to be available all the time. Availability is a consequence of the reliability of the system (associated with faults, and their repair) and the ability to cope with congestion (resulting from excessive demand). Adopting a layered fall-back approach to selecting technical solutions helps mitigate unavailability. A fall-back solution may not necessarily provide the same 'richness' of communication, such as voice telephony falling back to a pager. For further advice see Ensuring Resilient Telecommunications: A Survey of some Technical Solutions [PDF, 37 pages, 480KB].

Interoperability should not be taken for granted. Technical interoperability that enables seamless communications between different telecommunications platforms (such as GSM networks and the PSTN - using the National Numbering System to identify subscriber apparatus) is often taken for granted. But this convenience may not always be the case, for instance ‘gateways’ are not necessarily provided to the PSTN from private business radio systems. Procedural interoperability becomes increasingly important with point-to-multipoint communications. Communication is greatly enhanced through adhering to agreed protocols which may take the form of call-signs and radio discipline (particularly for mobile radio communications) and agreed procedures for managing conference calls.

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