Significant communications investment to keep emergency responders and the public safe

Fire and Emergency will benefit from a new digital communications network that will roll out from next year.

The Public Safety Network will deliver emergency services with a single secure digital radio network and greatly improved mobile broadband and cellular access. Together the technologies will help meet the ever-increasing data and information needs of frontline staff as they are out and about serving the community.

It is a joint effort between Fire and Emergency, Police, Hato Hone St John, and Wellington Free Ambulance, and enable these agencies to communicate with each other more effectively during emergency incidents to keep people safe, and to protect life and property.

The news was released to the public by Police Minister Chris Hipkins on Thursday afternoon(external link).

This follows the signing of contracts with the successful vendors:

• Tait Communications and Kordia for the Land-Mobile Radios (LMR)
• Spark and Vodafone NZ (soon to be One NZ) for the broadband/cellular.

The PSN programme is broken up into three key projects within Fire and Emergency

• LMR: Replacement of the current analogue radio network with a digital network.
• Cellular: Increase the quality of our Cellular Platform, while also enabling us to access priority and roaming across the two major cellular networks.
• Personal Alerting: exploration of options to enhance or replace the current paging system.

The new PSN network will provide more LMR coverage than Fire and Emergency currently has today. Frontline personnel will benefit from the more data rich features that the new networks will provide, including:

• Increased use of tablets may decrease the demand on voice comms.
• GPS location could potentially be available to more of the fleet, providing an opportunity to assist with the dispatching of appliances.
• Frontline staff will have more portability in terms of operational comms, e.g. operational smartphones and portable access to the LMR network.

If you have any questions or would like to know more about the Public Safety Network, visit the Portal page or get in touch: FENZPSN@fireandemergency.nz