Friday fragments - comms news from around the web for 29 August 2014

A round-up of the week's critical communications and public safety radio news for Friday, 29 August 2014.

Comms Connect Melbourne - make sure you're there. There's only about a month to go until Comms Connect returns to Melbourne, with more than 60 local and international speakers, six industry workshops and more than 90 exhibitors. Full details of the program and how to register are available on the Comms-Connect.com.au website.

Telstra trialling 700 MHz in Sydney and Adelaide. Telstra will add Sydney and Adelaide to its extant trial sites 700 MHz (Perth, Fremantle, Mt Isa, Mildura, Griffith and Esperance) in anticipation of the band becoming ready to use next year.

Army surplus for mobile comms. A county in the US has bought surplus Humvees from the Army to use as mobile communications centres during disasters. The county hopes the heavy-duty vehicles will give them easier access to emergencies in difficult and remote terrain.

Quick, call the coppers. Some dumb thieves have been caught on film (video here), trying to steel copper from an emergency comms radio tower in the US. A dispatcher spotted the attempted theft in progress on a webcam that monitors the site.

Report on life after LTE. 4G Americas, a wireless industry trade association representing the 3GPP family of technologies, has released a report by Rysavy Research titled 'Beyond LTE: Enabling the Mobile Broadband Explosion'. The report “compares on multiple levels the mobile broadband technologies of today, as well as the future technologies that are being standardized or planned, and their ability to deliver greater performance in the increasingly complex and challenging mobile computing industry. Comparisons that are provided in the report include throughput speeds for uplink and downlink, spectral capacity, latency, scope and scale, and other important features."

Disaster comms workshop held in Kathmandu. A Multinational Communications Interoperability Program (MCIP) staff workshop, hosted by the Nepal Army (NA) and the United States Pacific Command (USPACOM), was held in Kathmandu last week. The two-week-long program named Pacific Endeavour PE-14, focused on the sharing of information during joint operations in times of natural disaster. The workshop involved 21 nations, 66 representatives from industry, academia and international humanitarian organisations.

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