Mobilising App

Local Fire and Rescue Services (FRS) have been using wide area paging over the last few decades as a means of primarily contacting or mobilising officers and some crews.

There have been two main providers - Vodafone Paging and PageOne.

These are currently the only two traditional national paging suppliers in the UK with any market share.

As of Q2 2017, Vodafone announced that they were looking to sell their paging business to PageOne, which was subsequently rejected by the Competition and Markets Authority.

Following this all customers were given notice that Vodafone were to close their paging business completely by November 2017 (6 months' notice).

Following feedback, a later & final date of March 2018 has been announced.

Immediately after the announcement, the three Thames Valley Fire & Rescue Services (BFRS, OFRS & RBFRS) met to discuss options for the way forward as well as investigating the most obvious solution of transferring our paging requirements like for like to PageOne.

The decision was taken that given the cessation of Vodafone's service this was the opportune time to assess our needs and seek a different solution that would meet our requirements both now and into the future.

There is an urgent need for BFRS, OFRS & RBFRS to identify a suitable replacement within a limited timescale due to all Officers, On Call & Day Crewing personnel currently being alerted via Vodafone wide area pagers.

The decision has therefore been taken to move to an app based mobilising system.