New broadband spectrum for emergency services
The Australian Communications and Media Authority has announced the opening of a new spectrum of broadband for the country’s public safety agencies.
The frequency should assist in disaster relief operations
The ACMA said the range is capable of extremely high capacity, short range, instantly deployable data and video communications. It added that the spectrum has been identified internationally for public protection and disaster relief applications.
“PSA rely heavily on a broad range of radiocommunications services to carry out their responsibilities,” said ACMA Chairman, Chris Chapman.
“The spectrum being provided to PSA comes from a number of frequency bands and offers a level of flexibility and interoperability that is frankly unprecedented.
“This will provide the basis for a state of the art, public safety communications ecosystem intended to serve the voice, data and video communications needs of public safety agencies well into the future.
“This class licence will support our PSA in deploying a wide range of applications.
“The expected use of the band will be primarily to support mobile and point-to-multipoint applications, especially in situations where there is a localised spike in data demand such as around an incident site. The flexibility of the class licence will also provide for the deployment of temporary fixed links, such as video surveillance backhaul and data linking from airborne platforms.”