Friday fragments - critical comms snippets for 8 May 2015

A round-up of the week’s critical communications and public safety radio news for Friday, 8 May, 2015.

Airwave system goes down. The Airwave public safety comms system used in the UK went down in the London area for 40 minutes late last month. Airwave Solutions says the network outage was the result of the failure of a back-up power system. “To minimise disruption to our customers and while diagnostic tests were being run, Airwave took the decision at 09:34am to switch to our standby network in order to restore a full service,” said an official statement. “Switching to the standby network started at 09:38am and full service was restored within two minutes, by 09:40am. Over the past year, our resilient network has consistently delivered over 99.97% availability, making an issue of this kind extremely unusual.”

Icom NZ wins award. Icom NZ has taken out the 2015 RFUANZ Customer Service Award. Sponsored by Vertex Standard, the award recognises “individuals who go out of their way to provide exceptional service and ongoing support to their customers”. The criteria for the award were customer satisfaction, resourcefulness, integrity and long-term customer relationships.

Rohde & Schwarz wins award. Test equipment specialist Rohde & Schwarz has been given the 2015 Global Frost & Sullivan Award for Competitive Strategy Innovation and Leadership. “Rohde & Schwarz is especially strong in product innovation and has built on this reputation in the oscilloscope market,” said Frost & Sullivan Industry Director Jessy Cavazos. “It has diligently developed an extensive portfolio of oscilloscopes that include several product lines covering a wide range of end users, from design engineers performing research to customers looking only to make basic measurements.”

Airbus delivers satcoms to French. Airbus Defence and Space says it has delivered the sophisticated ‘Comcept’ high-speed satellite network to DGA (the French defence procurement agency). Comcept will be used by the French Ministry of Defence to complement the Syracuse satellite system with high-speed and all-IP data transmission capabilities provided by the Ka frequency band. The delivery of the first tranche of the Comcept system also triggers the beginning of the in-service support phase, which is scheduled to last for 15 years.

FCC looking at Wi-Fi, LTE issues. The US FCC is investigating possible issues arising from the desire of telcos to share Wi-Fi frequencies, the concern being that such use could clog up internet services. In a statement, the FCC said: “LTE-U could operate in conjunction with licensed commercial wireless services using a technique called Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) whereby a channel in an operator’s licensed spectrum is used as the primary channel for devices operating on an unlicensed basis. By this Public Notice, the Office of Engineering and Technology and the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau seek information on these technologies and the techniques they will implement to share spectrum with existing unlicensed operations and technologies such as Wi-Fi that are widely used by the public.”