The president of the Integrated System of Emergency and Security Networks of Portugal (SIRESP), Paulo Viegas Nunes, assured this Tuesday that the network “no faults in its constructionNeither reject calls, nor fail in the fires this year.
“SIRESP does not reject calls, sequence calls and guarantee emergency mechanisms within the emergency, because its availability is not at stake in a situation that puts human life at risk or that implies immediate action, since the system has a mechanism for emergency calls that do not queue“, the official told reporters at the headquarters of SIRESP, a communication network that has been criticized several times in recent years for the alleged lack of response in fighting the fires.
Paulo Viegas Nunes, among other network administrators, explained to the journalists, on site, how SIRESP works, with examples, and the president explained that the network continued to function even when everything around it had burned down.
In the Serra da Estrela fire, which lasted more than a week, most of the operators were left without communication because their structures burned “but the SIRESP network continued to function” and was, in many cases, “the only network that was active”
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“The network complied and complies to this day. From the record we have, since the beginning of the fire season there was a base station that, despite having burned the connectivity, also burned the infrastructure. This happened at 18:06 and at 02:00 the station was restored,” he said.
In the explanation of how the network works, it was mentioned that the “radios” have more functions besides communication, such as a repeater, increasing the coverage perimeter. “Ultimately, the system works only with radios.“said the president.
In other words, he added, “the network is working permanently” and this was not contradicted in the current fire, in Serra da Estrela, nor in the Leiria fire, last month, he said.
Viegas Nunes explained that the SIRESP network has a queuing system, in which a call that is not answered immediately, because there is saturation, goes to that queue. But what often happens, he said, is that the unattended operative carries out the “talk chop“, so the call always goes to the end of the queue. If you press it just once, it “enters the system in an average of three seconds,” he said, noting that SIRESP does not reject calls.
Does this situation indicate a lack of training on how the network works? Paulo Viegas Nunes denied the phrase “lack of training” but admitted that “many times there is a lack of understanding of how the network works”, explaining that the SIRESP seeks to share information about the operation of the network, through actions that have already been carried out or will be carried out.
SIRESP, he said, requires permanent training, among other things because it is rethinking itself and preparing for the transition to another generation of communications, with greater bandwidth.
“If there is a need for training in the broadest sense of the term I have a notion that there”, he said. Questioned by journalists, however, he did not point out that this was the reason why seven firefighters were without communication on Monday, in the Serra da Estrela fire.
The SIRESP has about 37,000 users (especially Civil Protection, GNR and PSP) and can reach 53,000, especially because it has requests from entities that are not directly linked to the State emergency and security but are in the State sphere, said the responsible.
Vitor Custódio, who explained how the network works, said that if one of the 247 base stations loses connection, all the radios connected to it can continue to work.
Last week the Government announced that SIRESP will make a new investment of 4.2 million euros in redundancy equipment to ensure satellite communications in the event of failure of terrestrial circuits.
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This investment, with funds from the Recovery and Resilience Plan, was already scheduled, said Viegas Nunes.
Source: Observadora
