Delivering DMR digital communications across Australia

The Orion Network covers the most densely populated areas of Australia, providing a robust digital solution for government agencies and commercial enterprises. With an equivalent network coming online in New Zealand and similar networks in some Asian countries, it clearly is providing a solution to a need. 

In this companion piece to our story on Newcastle City Council, Critical Comms digs deeper into the Orion Network and the capabilities and coverage it provides. Jonathan Nally spoke with Bevan Clarke, Motorola Solutions’ General Manager of Radio Channels for Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.

Are you finding there’s growing interest amongst customers for a ready-made network, rather than having to put in a bespoke system and then have the hassles of maintaining it?

Yes, that’s something that we’re seeing in the marketplace. A lot of big customers, such as airports and transport operators, at the end of the day just want to do their business, which is to take a box from X to Y or fly planes from Adelaide to Sydney. They don’t really want to be caught up in the technology, so they leverage partners like Gencom and the Orion network to get their outcome and an operations-based model. That’s what this is all about now, accessing the latest and greatest technology with integration of voice and data communication across a single platform.

At the end of last year, there was a big push towards narrow-banding in the Australian radio market that got a lot of operators thinking about what they were going to do with their existing hardware, and how they could future-proof themselves in a 5- to 10-year period post that cutover. Digital two-way radio enables this. It protects investment and encourages development of applications to come onto it, which analog networks don’t - analog networks are restricted by the hardware, and can only do so much.

Please click here to read the full interview