The Norwegian Public Safety Network (Norwegian: Nødnett literally Emergency Network) is a public safety network system based on Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA). Nødnett is implemented by the Directorate for Emergency Communication (Norwegian: Direktoratet for nødkommunikasjon). The network is primarily used for internal and interdisciplinary communication by the police, fire departments and health services. Nødnett is also used by several organisations participating in rescue and emergency work. Planning of the network started in 1995 and in 2006 the contract to build it was awarded to Nokia Siemens Networks. As Nokia Siemens Networks was unable to complete the contract, it was passed on to Motorola Solutions in 2012. The critical infrastructure of Nødnett was finished and was operational in all districts of mainland Norway by December 1, 2015. The network replaced nearly 300 local and regional networks which operated independently for the fire, police and healthcare agencies. Nødnett allows functionality such as authentication, encryption and higher reliability.
Background and choice of technology
Before Nødnett, there was one radio network for each emergency service, all based on analog radio. The old system had two main downsides: it was not encrypted with no privacy (as was requested by the Norwegian Data Inspectorate) - giving crimainals a chance to evade arrest by listen in on police radio action, and it prevented communication between agencies, which was vital during disasters and because Norway is also a member of the Schengen Agreement, which required the capability of cross-border communications. The encryption upgrade would either have had to be done through an expensive upgrade to the existing systems, or through the construction of a new, digital network. Officials also toyed with using conventional GSM, but opted against it because of the lack of functionality provided by TETRA. There were 27 different networks for the police, one for each police district. In Oslo, Akershus and Østfold, the police had also been using Enhanced Digital Access Communication System, or EDACS since 1994 - a technology more dominant, at the time, in North America than anywhere in Continental Europe. There were 230 municipal fire department radio systems, and a manual mobile phone system for the health sector. The health network was built by the county municipalities between 1990 and 1995 that covered all parts of the health service, including paramedics, ambulance services, midwives and medical doctors. The various systems had different levels of coverage. In addition, Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) and Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT450) telephones were being used where encrypted communication was necessary. For a time, officials even contemplated adding encryption to the existing radio systems, but the idea was aborted after questions arose on would the level be sufficient enough and reliability. Global System for Mobile Communication – Railway (GSM-R) was also considered because at the time, the Norwegian National Rail Administration was at the time building a GSM-R network to cover the entire Norwegian railway network; it was, however, rejected because of the lack of trans-border functionality and the need for more base stations, and thus higher investment costs, and longer start-up time for calls. Eventually, the TETRA standard won due to having multiple features such as group conversations and emergency activation and the fact that it supported gear from multiple suppliers and had a fallback feature allowing users close to the base station to still communicate if part of the system broke down. The government considered using a similar procurement solution to that in Denmark, where the spectrum was licensed to private enterprise, and the agencies purchase services from private telecommunications companies, based on conventional GSM technology. However, in Denmark this had not led to the desired results, with only Metropolitan Copenhagen being covered. Instead, the Norwegian Government chose to establish a government agency to build and operate the network. Use of the GSM and NMT450 network was insufficient because of lack of capacity in the conventional network in case of larger amounts of communication, lack of ability of group conversations, lack of priority systems and long dial-up times. In a parliamentary hearing in 2002 both DNK director Tor Helge Lyngstøl and Minister of Justice, Odd Einar Dørum, stated that the choice of TETRA would provide sufficient data capacity. In a parliamentary decision in 2004 it was decided to opt for the open European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) as a data transmission standard, which is used by all other police TETRA systems in Europe, but this was later changed by the directorate to the proprietary TETRA Enhanced Data Service (TEDS) owned by Motorola. The latter would limit the number of supplies and would increase the investment costs. In 2000, the annual cost of agency communication was NOK 175 million, while this had increased to NOK 260 million in 2004. The increase was largely caused by the increase in use of mobile telephones. The costs of the fire department networks was paid for by the municipalities, the health network paid for by the municipalities and the regional health authorities, and the police networks by the respective police districts.
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