Friday fragments - comms news from around the web for 13 December 2013

A weekly round-up of critical communications and public safety radio for Friday, 13 December 2013.

Failure to communicate. Despite spending US$75 million over the past few years, Nebraskan authorities are still having trouble providing full service levels on a new digital radio system put in place for first responders and police. One of the problems includes occasional inability for some police officers to communicate with each other, leading to a ludicrous situation in June last year when officers had to resort to running messages by hand during an armed hold-up at a pharmacy.

TETRA spreads in India. Police in the Indian state of Gujarat will have their legacy VHF radios replaced with TETRA units. The state government has issued tenders for a system to cover five cities. TETRA is already in use by police forces in other cities such as Delhi and Hyderabad.

ACMA's annual comms report. ACMA has released its Communications report 2012-13, which looks at personal and business use of all forms of electronic communications throughout the nation. The report is full of interesting facts and figures, including that there were 8.8 million calls to emergency numbers and that 99.1% of calls were answered with the benchmark 10 seconds.

Today's (13 December) Critical Comms eNewsletter is the final one for 2013. We'll return in the second week of January. Everyone here at Critical Comms wishes you a safe and happy festive season, and a great start to a successful and prosperous 2014!