Vic keeps Motorola for emergency comms

Motorola Solutions will stay on-board to provide the emergency-services radio network for the Victorian Government for the next four years, and to upgrade the service in a deal worth $130 million.

Motorola Solutions secured the deal after meeting service requirements for the Metropolitan Mobile Radio network that it built for the government in 2004. That network is used by the Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority (ESTA), the Victorian Police, Ambulance Victoria and the Metropolitan Fire Brigade in Melbourne. The company will upgrade the P25 standard frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) network to P25 phase two time-division multiple access (TDMA) in the four-year period of the new agreement between July 2012 and July 2016.

According to Gary Starr, managing director of Motorola Solutions Australia, upgrading the network will ensure that the government keeps up with demand in high-population areas, where spectrum is scarce, because TDMA effectively doubles the amount of spectrum that the network can use.

"All the networks will evolve to this phase two, particularly important in major population areas," he said, adding that the upgrade is simple and already underway.

"The network is being refreshed as we speak, actually," he said. "It's literally a software switch to switch it on."

Although the upgrade is part of the pitch by Motorola to keep the contract for another four years, Starr said that Motorola Solutions has been "obsessive" about meeting the contract requirements. He said that for installation, the company would have a two-hour turnaround time to install new radios in some vehicles.

"You never want to get to a point where they say: is there something better out there?"

Josh Taylor travelled to Kickstart as a guest of MediaConnect.