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| Ryu Hee-in, vice minister of the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, speaks during a conference about the national disaster safety communications network at Seoul Government Complex, April 20. / Courtesy of Ministry of the Interior and Safety |
By Baek Byung-yeul
The prolonged public safety network project will be on track as the government will place an order worth about 1.7 trillion won ($1.58 billion) next month.
An official from the Ministry of the Interior and Safety told reporters Wednesday it will issue a request of proposal (RFP) in June and begin the project in July.
The ministry said the construction of the national disaster safety communications network will be completed by 2020. The business scale will be around 1.7 trillion won including the construction cost of 445.4 billion won, the terminal device cost of 400.6 billion won, the operation cost of 797.6 billion won and a reserve fund of 84.6 billion won.
The construction of the public safety long-term evolution (PS-LTE) network is divided into three phases. The first phase, which will be started this year, will cover three provinces and two cities including North and South Chungcheong provinces, Gangwon Province and Sejong and Daejeon cities. The second phase will cover Busan, Daegu, Ulsan, North Gyeongsang Province, North and South Jeolla provinces and Jeju Island next year. The third phase will be Seoul, Incheon and Gyeonggi Province in 2020.
Although how the business will be structured has yet to be unveiled, it remains to be seen who will have a larger slice of the pie in this business among the country's three mobile carriers -- SK Telecom, KT or LG Uplus.
In order to maintain fair business practices, the government is expected to classify its business areas into several sectors for each phase of the project. Also, in order to secure safety, the business operator will be responsible for operating and managing the cited areas for a certain period.
The need for a national disaster safety communications network was first brought up in 2002 when government agencies dealing with national disasters were still using old two-way radios.
The government was also hit hard for not having digitized its public safety network in 2003 when nearly 200 people died in the Daegu subway fire. At that time, each subway train was able to communicate with a control tower but there was no way to communicate between them.
After long preparations, the safety ministry and its affiliated agencies held two pilot projects for about seven months from November 2015 to June 2016 in Gangwon Province.
With a business scale of 42 billion won, the government's trial project established a demonstration network for PS-LTE service in the cities of PyeongChang, Jeongseon and Gangneung, the three host cities of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Games.
The government invested 33.7 billion won in the first pilot project, for which KT took up the construction of a demonstration network in the PyeongChang area, spending 8.2 billion won for SK Telecom to build a trial safety network in Jeongseon and Gangneung.
Once the public safety network system is done, public agencies for emergency and disaster management will have a better coordination system among them. In times of disaster, government agencies such as fire departments, police, rescue teams and disaster control centers are able to share multimedia information such as high-resolution images and videos through a high-speed PS-LTE network.
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