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Comment by iefbr14 | Hacker News Reader

$500 million is quite a lot for encrypting radio signals. And it wont help against jamming.

These radios aren't cheap (not saying they're justified). The ones we just got issued in my county's fire departments were over $9,000 each.

But they are both VHF and UHF, fully watertight, connect to our SCBA packs, can give precise location info (UWB as well as GPS, I believe), can withstand high heat, are 'intrinsically safe' (which I gather to mean that even if dropped the battery / pack / terminals should not arc, which could be a problem in a hazmat/flammable gas situation) and are very heavy duty.

Again, not saying it's worth that, but also a lot more going on than the HT1250s they're replacing, which go for about $150 on eBay now.

The main reason prices are so high is indirectly due to the civilian restrictions on encrypted radio. There's no real competition because the market is a relatively small B2I environment with no ability to defray costs by rolling out to civilians (plus they wouldnt be able compete on price with cheap Chinese radios anyways).

> And it wont help against jamming.

No, but if you're running a jammer, it's not going to be long before the FCC pays you a friendly visit, and instructs to you to kindly turn that shit off.

'What if someone will be running a jammer to disrupt police communication' is about as big a concern for this procurement as 'what if there's a full-scale thermonuclear war'. Sure, it can happen, but it's not on a PD's top-50 list of things to be concerned about.

It sounds more like $500 million for upgrading the entire network, which isn't entirely unreasonable. It could have been cheaper, but there are some factors that make it more expensive:

* The network is in the US, where infrastructure is always more expensive.

* It's for a government entity, and the US is known for its inefficient government spending.

* They may have to buy American instead of shopping around for the best deal. Encrypted government radio networks are state-of-the-art technology from the 90s. There are plenty of established systems to choose from if you are willing to trust them.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no requirement that the NYPD only procures American-made equipment.

Replacing a radio network is expensive, but $500M is eye-poppingly large. Given the NYPD’s track record of financial infidelity, it isn’t unreasonable to suspect a decent amount of graft at play here.

Hong Kong budgeted HK$ 948 million for a comparable TETRA network in 2001. That's $120 million nominal and $210 million adjusted for inflation. Compared to that, $500 million doesn't sound entirely unreasonable.

It's hard to find more recent numbers, because these days everyone is transitioning their government radio networks to use commercial infrastructure.

2.5x what a larger municipality paid for a system that was newer at the time seems pretty unreasonable to me. It’s not like the NYPD is field testing something cutting-edge here.

Meanwhile, imagine what that could do for the MTA, the housing shortage, the migrant situation, or the homeless population.

It’s slightly more than the annual budget of the New York Public Library system, which is being forced to open fewer days and close branches thanks to Adams’s budget cuts.

It’s slightly less than the amount by which the NYC schools budget is being cut this year (the same year federal stimulus funding goes away), forcing schools to cut things like pre-k programs.

For the MTA, not much. Their yearly budget is more than $19 billion per year: https://new.mta.info/budget/MTA-operating-budget-basics.

A lot of that is earmarked for capital projects and debt servicing. An extra $500 million would actually go pretty far: reduced headways (like they’re trying this year), more frequent station cleanings, etc.

It's NYC. They have a way more infrastructure needs that most cities.

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