Summary

  • The Home Office’s Emergency Services Mobile Communications Programme wants Ofcom to publish more granular information on actual mobile-network availability, ideally a map showing how outages change over time.
  • It also urges consideration of mandatory power resilience and service measures that reflect emergency operations. Ofcom says it will report its next steps in early 2027.

A signal bar can outlive the service it advertises. A mast may appear on a coverage map while the electricity feeding it has gone. That gap sits at the centre of a Home Office response to Ofcom’s mobile-connectivity discussion paper. The response was dated 1 July; Ofcom placed it in the public response docket on 22 October. Its demand is wonderfully awkward for a regulator fond of coverage maps: show the outages, too.

The Home Office programme runs the Emergency Services Network, or ESN, which is intended to replace the dedicated Airwave system. Its submission says ESN will ride on EE’s commercial radio network with a separate managed virtual-network core. Service launch and user migration are planned from 2028; withdrawal of Airwave is targeted before the end of 2030. The same radio sites will therefore carry a public-safety obligation whose success cannot be judged by the ordinary customer’s video stream.

Ofcom’s June discussion paper proposes that a network deliver its consumer “good performance” measure in at least 90% of measurements in an area. The Home Office asks for several service profiles instead. An emergency vehicle needs coverage while moving, usable voice and data, priority when a cell is busy, and a connection that survives a power cut. A single score built around common smartphone use hides which of those functions failed.

The submission’s sharpest proposal is a public time dimension. It urges Ofcom to publish actual availability at a more granular level, ideally with maps that show how each network’s service changes through an outage. The Home Office says it understands Ofcom plans to collect outage information down to individual radio-access sites. That would turn a static coverage promise into a record a responder, council or resident could examine after the lights come back.

Power is the other uncomfortable line in the filing. The Home Office says it has had to augment EE’s network for ESN and calls mains-power resilience a candidate for intervention. It urges the government and Ofcom to consider mandatory levels using the Telecommunications Security Act framework. The issue reaches beyond ambulances: when a household’s fixed line also depends on local power, the mobile network becomes its emergency route.