Cisco announces system for safety agencies' radios

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Data network company Cisco Systems on Monday announced a system that links police, fire and rescue departments' radio networks that now cannot communicate with one another.

Hospitals, transportation companies and other businesses that use different communications systems would also be able to speak directly to each other without having to upgrade or buy new networks and handsets, the company said.

The system is a combination of hardware and software that hooks into the organisation's radio communications system and then converts the two-way radio signals into digital packets that are sent across networks, Cisco said.

Many systems in use today cannot talk to each other because they use different radio frequencies, Cisco said, which calls its new system the Internet Protocol Interoperability and Collaboration Systems, or "IPICS".

The US Congress in 2003 appropriated more than US$150 million for local and state governments to make their public safety networks interoperable, but progress has been slow.

"It remains a huge problem," said John Powell, a consultant to the Homeland Security and Justice departments on radio interoperability. "If the Los Angeles River is filled with water, and you have a policeman on one side and a fire department truck on the other side, to coordinate operations they have to call dispatchers and dispatchers have to relay messages."

There are some 70,000 independent public safety agencies in the United States, Powell said, and most of them built networks that were never designed to communicate with each other.

Cisco is testing the service in more than a dozen field trials, and plans to make it available in about six months, said senior vice president Charlie Giancarlo.