London Borough of Croydon Council, UK
London Borough of Croydon Council covers an area of 33 square miles and is the most heavily populated of London’s 32 boroughs with over 330,000 residents. More than 400 council staff, including security, municipal services, housing, facilities management, shop watch and safer neighborhood teams needed tough, lightweight and waterproof radios for instant one-to-one and group communications.
“Tait TP8100 radios deliver the health and safety features we need to give our housing officers, wardens, caretakers and other front-line staff the best possible protection with the option to add new security-enhancing capabilities as they become available.”
Paul Hayward, Neighborhood Services Manager, London Borough of Croydon Council
The Challenge
Following the installation of a trunked, borough-wide network to replace twelve separate back-to-back systems, London Borough of Croydon needed to update user radios to meet the latest health and safety requirements.
The council’s existing radios lacked the functionality required to enable efficient cross-team collaboration between a growing number of mobile workers. Range, clarity and voice quality needed improving in Croydon’s hilly, increasingly build-up area. The council also wanted to leverage advances in handset design and provide workers with ergonomically shaped units that were robust enough to withstand rough wear-and-tear and wet weather conditions.
The council also needed to add location-tracking capability to further enhance the safety of housing and neighborhood services workers who operate alone or in remote parts of the borough.
The Solution
Croydon chose Tait TP8100 trunked portables on the recommendation of its long-standing communications partner and Tait reseller Chatterbox Radio. The built-in emergency key, Lone Work button and long battery life offered the best value for money. The radios support both one-to-one and group calls while providing a platform for features that conform to health and safety requirements, such as location tracking using GPS. In addition, the Tait handsets provide seamless compatibility with the legacy two-way radio equipment used by other parts of the council.
Croydon opted to rent the portables it needed, which allowed the council to benefit immediately from the new radios without any capital outlay and at a budgetable monthly cost. The reseller’s expertise in Tait systems and same-day replacement service for faulty units gave the council an end-to-end management solution without the need for in-house expertise.
