Name Change for Australasian Tetra and Critical Communications Forum

During the ATCCF Annual General Meeting members endorsed the Board’s recommendation for the change of name to “Australasian Critical Communications Forum Ltd” (ACCF) to be consistent with the name change and activities of The international Critical Communications Association (TCCA) and embrace the opportunity to broaden the Forum charter and relevance to members and all mission critical industry stakeholders.

Recognising the need for mission critical and business critical grade open standard broadband services, the Forum will support the efforts of the TCCA, 3GPP, ETSI and other relevant global standardization bodies to evolve standards that will satisfy these end user needs into the future.

With developments in mobile communications technology moving at an ever increasing pace, today’s consumers expect that information will be available to them wherever and whenever they want. In the professional mobile critical communications industry, our users expect those benefits to be replicated by their own digital communications networks.

Public Safety and Public Protection and Disaster Relief organisations need mission critical data to deal effectively with routine work and with major incidents. Transport companies need real time information on the deployment of their fleets. Electricity companies need to manage a fundamental change from large power stations to a host of wind generators, solar panels and other natural resources and in the Oil and Gas and Mining Industries critical data is becoming more critical. These are just a few examples.

The Board of the ATCCF has, for some time, been looking at how to address these challenges for the future and decided to follow the lead of The international Critical Communications Association (TCCA) for the development of solutions for future open standard critical communications users and t0 expand its original goal for all those interested in critical non-proprietary digital narrow band and broadband standards.

Reasons for the name change:

• to supports the achievements of the TCCA internationally as one of the leading authorities on global critical communications and its duty to its members from all categories to be at the forefront of developments for the future and to continue to be a leader in the field of mission critical and business critical open standard communications in support of established digital Land Mobile Radio essential to end users.
• to build on the technology expertise and investment of our Members in Australasia and around the globe in support of mission critical and business critical non-proprietary, international “open” wireless communication standards such as TETRA, P25 and DMR.
• to enable the Australasian Critical Communications Forum and its Members to drive and support technology developments particularly with relation to the development of open standard for mission critical and business critical Broad band (LTE) and future 5G technology evolution.

The name change in no way diminishes our focus on TETRA, but rather lays the foundation for the continuing success of critical communications based on open standardization. Supported by the TCCA, TETRA has been a huge success worldwide and is ideally matched to the voice and wideband data needs of mission critical and business critical users.

Going forward it is the Forum’s belief that TETRA will continue to be a prime solution for mission critical and business critical voice for the foreseeable future and continue to support and promote the significant virtues of TETRA technologies alongside other successfully proven open standard technologies P25 and DMR in the Australasian region.

The ACCF will update its website and logos according to the name change shortly.