Friday fragments — critical comms snippets for 31 July 2015

A round-up of the week's critical communications and public safety radio news for Friday, 31 July 2015.

Sydney’s emergency comms go silent. That’s Sydney in Nova Scotia, Canada. And the silence is due to the introduction of an encrypted Trunk Mobile Radio (TMR2) communications network.

Academy numbers double. In the latest issue of Critical Comms magazine, we speak with Dean Brookes, GM Asia-Pacific for Tait Communications. Amongst other things, he discusses the role of the new Tait Radio Academy and the response it has received out in the market. Tait now informs us that in the space of the few weeks since we spoke with Dean, the number of people signed up to the academy’s courses has doubled, and more are joining every day. Great work!

Kansas 9-1-1 goes cloudy. The Kansas 9-1-1 Coordinating Council has awarded a contract to AT&T to provide a Next Generation 9-1-1 IP-based emergency communications system across the state. The system will provide access to emergency services from virtually all connected communications sources, as well as multimedia data capabilities for 9-1-1 call centres.

Norway and Russia discuss spectrum. Norwegian and Russian authorities have held talks on frequency usage in border areas, including discussions on the use of 700 MHz for mobile broadband.

South Korea to test LTE PTT. A demonstration of mission-critical PTT over LTE will take place in South Korea later this year.

FirstNet looking at mobile comms. A blog on the US FirstNet site discusses options being considering for implementing a “Mobile Communications Unit (MCU) and its role in incident deployment and coverage extension options. FirstNet anticipates that the MCU and other alternatives will play a role as coverage extension tools within the deployment of the nationwide public safety broadband network.”