The Knight Errant Host entry in Data trails (pg 95) says that most field gear is slaved to the Host
That's pretty dumb.
It probably costs less to have a security host with a stupidly high firewall guarding all the gear then to get a commlink (max firewall of 6-7) for every officer out there. Plus it makes it easier for logistical and monitoring oversight purposes and gives the home office a way to deal with/track officers who've gone rogue or the gear that some punk ganger or dumb runner though it would be a good idea to steal.
I'm not sure about that, I would think they would want all officers to have a work comm forming their work PAN that the company has easy access to, and can easily reach them using.
They'll all have coms for communication (don't know if they'd be full commlinks, but probably are), but it still makes sense to slave those to the host as well. The higher firewall will then also not just stop hackers from stealing/breaking your stuff, but they'd probably find it far easier to encrypt and safeguard communications from outside eavesdropping, something I'm sure The Star and the pawns are eager to avoid. Buying basic (rating 2) coms for communication saves some 4,000 per unit over a secured commlink (rating 6). While host costs are monthly (I assume) and commlinks are one time buys, you factor tech reconditioning when transferring to a new employee and repair/replacement of damaged units, plus SOTA upgrades to keep up with deckers code exploits, and the bean counters are going to just say a host is better, which it pretty much is, unless the decker is good enough to crack the host, but they're less in number then those who can crack commlink PANs.
That said, those would be work coms and the cops would also have personal coms, which is what they'd slave their stuff to when they want to stay a bit apart from the precinct for any number of (mostly nefarious) reasons.
