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Last updated: 12 March 2010
The HITS service is now live at the pilot sites. The pilot sites include one transportable terminal, which can now be called out by colleagues from the crisis response community.
An update on HITS will be presented at the forthcoming national meeting of Telecommunications Sub Group Chairs, in late March. The HITS team will also present the transportable terminal call-out process in detail. Responders who would like to use a transportable terminal as part of a contingency planning exercise should contact HITS@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk to discuss their requirements with the project team.
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Following re-configuration activity to address the outcomes of the system testing that took place in December 2009, the HITS system has now been accepted for pilot sites. Live service commissioning is pending following agreement of some final aspects of the terms of service; commissioning is expected in the first week of March. Pre-installation work at Phase 2 sites continues and several more Phase 3 site surveys have been conducted.
Taking on board early feedback from responders based at the HITS pilot sites, the HITS user familiarisation material has been expanded to cover a more comprehensive range of topics and in more detail. End user familiarisation will be delivered on a site by site basis, as each site is brought on to the network.
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Pilot system testing has identified further configuration work that must be completed before service can be commissioned at the HITS Pilot sites. That configuration work is now underway with the aim of conducting further system wide testing in early 2010. Pre-installation work at Phase 2 sites is underway and the first Phase 3 site surveys have been conducted.
The January 27th 2010 Briefing Session is still going ahead: if you wish to attend please contact your local HITS Project Manager, or e-mail HITS@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk.
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Installation is complete at all but one of the pilot sites, with the final site installation expected to be complete very shortly. The next few weeks will be dedicated to site and system testing activities and end user familiarisation. We expect to declare initial operating capability in mid-December.
Site surveys for all Phase 2 sites are complete, and an installation schedule is being developed. A number of Phase 3 sites have now been successfully briefed, and site surveys for that phase have commenced. A further briefing session is planned for January 27th 2010: if you wish to attend please contact your local HITS Project Manager, or e-mail HITS@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk.
We hope to invite colleagues from regional Goverment Offices and central departments and their agencies to attend targeted HITS induction and end user familiarisation events in the first half of the new year, with a view to offering wider buy-in to the network.
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Installation continues at the pilot sites. All but two of the Phase 2 sites have now been surveyed and dates have been agreed to complete the remaining two surveys.
A provisional HITS transportable call-out process has been formulated and the core people and organisations involved in that process are now being briefed. The call-out process will be revised as necessary based on the outcome of early exercises to test the suitability of the process. It is planned to conduct the first "live" deployment of a transportable unit before the end of the year.
Work has been initiated to ensure that requests for National Resilience Extranet account creation for the first HITS sites to be commissioned will be treated as a priority once the NRE goes live.
Sites provisionally earmarked for Phase 3 of the roll-out will be warmed up at one of two formal events, the first of which will take place in late October at the Cabinet Office.
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Installation has commenced at the first of the pilot sites and will continue at that site and the remaining pilot sites over the next several weeks.
Role-based user accounts have been drawn up in consultation with end user representatives, and a numbering plan for the network has been agreed.
A provisional pilot site test schedule has been formulated for the fixed pilot sites and the first pilot site acceptance test is expected to take place in late October. An introduction to the HITS Standard Operating Procedures will be covered during the HITS end user familiarisation provided as part of the site acceptance testing process.
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Preparatory works services continue at each of the pilot sites. Installation at the pilot sites is planned to take place throughout September and October 2009.
Phase 2 site surveys are underway and the Cabinet Office has produced some supporting information for use in HITS related planning applications. That information is provided to sites prior to their site survey as part of Paradigm's pre-survey documentation.
Phase 3 sites have been provisionally identified and representatives of those sites will shortly be invited to attend a Q&A session hosted by the Cabinet Office and Paradigm to find out more. The sessions are planned for October 2009 and January 2010. Phase 3 installation will take place between April 2010 and March 2011.
HITS Site Agreements and HITS End User Agreements are being finalised. The agreements cover security, safety, and proper usage.
The HITS team will present a project update at the September 2009 meeting of Local Resilience Forum Telecommunications Sub-Groups in Birmingham.
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The HITS Critical Design Review took place at the end of June, verifying and baselining the detailed system design. Phase 2 sites have now been identified, and site surveys for that Phase have commenced. Phase 2 will install HITS at a further ten locations, commencing in December 2009 and completing before April 2010.
A full programme of testing and exercising for the pilot phase is being drawn up. Organisational requirements are being looked at in detail to ensure that agreed processes are in place for the operation of the system that can then be reflected in user training.
We are also further exploring the commercial structure and detail of options to extend the network beyond the core group of sites.
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The HITS project delivery team is collaborating with a group of key stakeholder representatives to develop the HITS User Standard Operating Procedures and to identify end users by role.
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The HITS Project remains on-track for Initial Operating Capability (IOC) in November 2009. All of the trial sites will have been surveyed by the end of May. The trial sites are in Sussex, Cheshire, North Yorkshire, South Wales and London.
Installations will begin in September with the aim of testing the system locally in October. System wide testing will be conducted prior to IOC in November. The Cabinet Office HITS Team has also tentatively identified sites for later rollout Phases in Project delivery, and will be contacting Police Forces across England and Wales to confirm rollout schedules.
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The Cabinet Office Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS) has this week placed the initial service order for a High Integrity Telecommunications System (HITS) designed to act as a highly resilient communications system for use by national, regional and local levels of crisis coordination. HITS will be supplied as a fully managed service by Paradigm Services, a subsidiary of Astrium Services. CCS has signed an agreement with the Ministry of Defence’s Global Communications Services Integrated Project Team (GCS IPT) which will act as contracting authority for the project on behalf of CCS.
HITS will equip key crisis management centres across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland with a resilient communications capability that will remain available in the event of short or no-notice disruption to the national telecommunications infrastructure. Delivery of the service exploits the Skynet 5 satellite communications PFI programme between the MoD and Paradigm. A satellite communications overlay complemented by terrestrial links will provide a resilient communications capability that is not reliant on the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). A core pool of fixed sites will be augmented by a number of transportable satellite communications terminals capable of being deployed at short notice to alternate locations as circumstances dictate.
The HITS services will be fully managed from Paradigm’s 24/7 fully redundant operational headquarters in Wiltshire. Paradigm will support the sites from a number of operational centres across the UK to ensure rapid response to any local problems with the infrastructure. It is expected that demonstration of the service will take place in late 2009, followed by a full roll-out to be completed by 2012.
Bruce Mann, head of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, said, “We are delighted to be working in partnership with Paradigm and the Ministry of Defence to deliver this strategically important project. The High Integrity Telecommunications System represents a significant step forward in telecommunications resilience for crisis coordination and is an excellent example of collaborative working across Government to deliver high impact, value for money solutions.”
General enquiries: Cabinet Office, 22 Whitehall, London SW1A 2WH.
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