Friday fragments - comms news from around the web for 10 April 2015

A round-up of the week's critical communications and public safety radio news for Friday, 10 April 2015.

Growing public safety mobile broadband sector. Market Research Reports has released a 'Global Public Safety Mobile Broadband Market in the Public sector 2015-2019' report that forecasts CAGR of 9.43% for 2014-19. The report covers video surveillance, natural or man-made disaster management, GIS, medical telemetry and vehicle surveillance.

Provider fined US$16m for 911 failure. In the biggest ever penalty of its kind, the US FCC has fined CenturyLink US$16 million for a 911 outage that affected several states and left millions of people without the ability to contact emergency services. The 'sunny day' outage affected 81 Public Safety Answering Points in seven states.

UHF in the Americas. A London School of Economics and Political Science blog post looks into the allocation of UHF spectrum in the Americas, finding that confusion and conflicting positions abound.

Korea under pressure on 700 MHz. South Korean authorities are coming under increasing pressure to reallocate 700 MHz spectrum from TV to mobile communications.

Canadians get emergency alerts. Most Canadians are now able to receive emergency alerts through commercial radio and television services. Most of the broadcasting industry has implemented the national public alerting system, Alert Ready, said the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. Alerts can be issued to warn of Amber Alerts, tornadoes, forest fires, floods, water contamination and industrial disasters. Cable and satellite companies, radio stations, over-the-air television stations and video-on-demand services are required to issue the emergency alerts, although not all have yet complied.

Cybersecurity a worry for dispatch centres. Concerns are being raised about the possibility of hackers breaching emergency call centres that are connected to the internet for the purpose of receiving information from the public via text messages and so on