A $140 million radio network designed to enable New York police officers working at street level to communicate with transit officers patrolling the city’s subways was finished six months ago. But it has yet to be put into use because of signal distortion problems.
A communications engineer who works for the transit division of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) said this week that a fix for the problems, involving the use of new digital signal processing technology, is on the way and should start being rolled out later this year.
But the cost of the fix is estimated by transit officials at $20 million, and the matter of who foots the extra bill is still up in the air.
For now, the New York City Police Department is refusing to use the new network because of concerns that the safety of the public or NYPD officers might be threatened as a result of the distortion that occurs when an officer carrying one of the radios goes from street level into the subway, or the reverse.
“It’s a very vexing technical issue,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in an e-mail response to questions that was sent to Computerworld by an NYPD spokesman. “People of goodwill are working on it both at the MTA and here. We want to make certain that the radio fully functions both below ground and aboveground.”
Because of the complexity of the subway system and the city’s topography, “it is extremely difficult to have a radio system that could work in both environments,” Kelly said. But he added that NYPD and MTA officials are continuing to talk about ways to resolve the signal distortion problems. “We’re trying to work it out on both ends,” he said.
Currently, police and transit officers use separate radio networks and have to pass messages to each other through central dispatchers. The integrated network was first conceived in 1995, when the transit police force was merged into the NYPD.
The NYPD “said from the start that the issue of substantial interference would have to be fixed before the system would be accepted by us,” Paul Browne, deputy police commissioner for public information, said in the same e-mail in which Kelly was quoted. “The interference experienced during the testing indicated that certain transmissions were inaudible or not understandable. It’s a safety issue that we’re working with the MTA to resolve.”
The MTA’s New York City Transit division concurs that distortion problems exist where the radio signals from inside and outside the subway meet. Joseph L. Yurman, principal communications engineer at the NYCT, said in an interview that because the subways have been built over many decades at relatively shallow depths, there is “insufficient isolation” between the signals above and below the ground.
The amount of distortion is “subjective” and varies from location to location, Yurman said. “It’s a physics problem, and there’s no software you can buy and — poof — it works. It’s very, very complicated, and there are a lot of variables.”
But, Yurman added, the NYCT has been working with several companies to pilot digital signal processing technology that could solve the problems. The new technology has eliminated the distortion in tests, he said, and the NYCT hopes to roll it out in one of the many subsystems that make up the overall network by midyear or year’s end at the latest. “We’re working as fast as we can,” he said.
Yurman wouldn’t estimate how long it would take to fully upgrade the radio network or what that would cost, nor would he identify the technology vendors involved in the so-called overlay upgrade initiative. But a spokesman for the NYCT said installing the overlay technology is expected to cost $20 million, an expense that he said should be borne by the NYPD.
But police officials wouldn’t comment on which agency is likely to bear the added cost. The $20 million would be on top of the $140 million that the MTA already spent to develop the radio network.
Design work after the merger of the two police departments led to a contract being issued to E.A. Technologies Inc. in Hauppauge, N.Y., and Petrocelli Electric Co. in Long Island City, N.Y., of the radio network, according to the NYCT spokesman. Officials at the two companies couldn’t be reached for comment on the radio network, which initially was expected to be finished in 2004 but wasn’t completed until the middle of last year.
