NEWSLETTER 28TH APRIL 2019 – Knife Detection – Future of our PSTN - OFCOM

Intruder28/04/201908/08/2021

NEWSLETTER 28TH APRIL 2019 – Knife Detection – Future of our PSTN – OFCOM

Knife Detection – knife crime is out of control, what is the government doing to combat it?

Knife crimes rose to over 40,000 incidents in England & Wales during 2018 to 2019

Several Companies have been funded to innovate technology to detect people carrying a knife in a public area. The government have set a side a total of £460,000 for these companies to improve current technologies. The technology will be available will the government subsidise the schools, transport, shopping malls and other public buildings/institutions for the installation of these systems?

Home Secretary Sajid Javid allocated 51 million pounds to police forces to fortify their fight against serious violence just before the Easter bank holiday weekend 2019.

Here are some figures courtesy of the Ministry of Justice. Published March 2019.

Knife and Offensive Weapon Sentencing Statistics, England and Wales – 2018

The highest number of knife and offensive weapon offences since 2009 were formally dealt with by the Criminal Justice System (CJS)

In 2018 21,484 knife and offensive weapon offences were formally dealt with by the CJS. This is the highest number of offences dealt with since 2009 (25,103).

Offenders are now more likely to receive an immediate custodial sentence for a knife and offensive weapon offence.

In 2018 37% of knife and offensive weapon offences ended in an immediate custodial sentence compared with 20% in 2008. The average length of the custodial sentences received also increased over the same period, from 5.3 months to 8.1 months.

For just under three quarters (72%) of offenders this was their first knife or offensive weapon possession offence

The proportion of offenders for whom this is their first knife or offensive weapon possession offence has been decreasing and is now at its lowest level since the series began in 2008 (80%).

This is a subject we need to be talking to our younger generation about also, those in authorities.

Are we educating our younger generation, the right way?
Do they have the social skills of the 1960,70 & 80s – Why not?
Is the current punishment a prevention?

The future of The PSTN – Public Switched Telephone Network

In the year 2025 PSTN will be made obsolete, many of us have home phones but are not using them, security industry is using PSTN for various forms of notification and monitoring of security systems. Millions of commercial, residential security and fire alarms and vulnerable people rely upon telecare are connected using PSTN

In the UK, BT have announced they will stop selling new PSTN and ISDN connections by 2020 with those networks becoming end of life by 2025. So, now is the time to plan for the future. Residential phones will migrate to Voice over IP.

Every infrastructure of PSTN providers is breast-fed from the BT infrastructure.

The switching off of PSTN is coming and systems providers/users need to upgrade and be aware of their options well before this happens.

The options will be GSM or Lan/Wan connections

NGN – Next Generation Networks, these networks are digital opposed to the analogue PSTN. The speed of digital is a lot faster than analogue and the result expected is a high quality of service.

APPs are now becoming common place in security and these rely on IP/Data connections. Notification/Manned monitoring is the is quite normal within a system. Maybe APPs will be the fore runner in the future.

Ofcom Changes

Reminder for those of you that have notifications of text messages (SMS) from your systems. OFCOM changes made quite a lot of systems inoperable, does your system need a configuration update to make SMS operational again. Contact Elite or your local installer for a quote.

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