Aussie company Auria to build trunked radio network for Ergon Energy

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 17 November 2011 11:44

Business IT - Networking

A small Australian company, Auria Wireless, has beaten major global manufacturers to win the contract to supply an APCO 25 trunked mobile radio network for Ergon Energy that, it says, will be the largest in Australia and possibly the largest in the world.

Auria Wireless is a subcontractor to the company rolling out the network, Airwave Solutions. According to Auria "The system will be deployed in stages growing to approximately 200 sites in total, making it the largest of its type in Australia, exceeding the current NSW GRN (Government Radio Network) in size."

Auria's managing director, Brad Dolphin, told iTWire: "The Ergon project is by far our biggest win. We believe this is the largest network of its kind, certainly in Australia and possibly in the world."

According to its web site, the GRN (also APCO 25) is one of the larger trunked radio networks in the world with coverage over an area of some 266,000 square kilometres, a third of the state.

Auria said: "Auria's radio network for Ergon Energy will be the first open standards network to be deployed in Australia utilising the ISSI [Inter-Sub-System-Interface] and CSSI protocols which allow the network to interconnect to other third party APCO P25 networks and equipment. The ISSI will be initially used within Ergon's network to support multiple RFSSs [radio frequency switching systems] adding regional network resilience in the event of natural disasters."

According to Dolphin: "Ergon had some very specific requirements that they believed we addressed better than some of the big guys." He added "In the APCO standard they have just released the latest location services standard, tier 2 GPS and this will be the first implementation of that in Australia."

Sydney-based Auria was established about five years ago by the shareholders of another Australian company, Etherstack. Dolphin said: "They started off developing protocol stacks for APCO 25 and TETRA [a European digital trunked mobile radio standard] and those were used by about two thirds of APCO 25 manufacturers to make their products APCO 25 compatible. About five years ago Etherstack took on a product focus and Auria was established to take those products to market. Recently Auria has been absorbed into Etherstack and is now a wholly owned subsidiary."

Dolphin said that all Auria's proprietary technology was made in Australia. "We have a very key component we call the channel controller that we design and manufacture in Australia. The rest of our software runs on standard Linux based servers.

"Our equipment is being used in the US, Canada, New Zealand and Russia. In Australia we have several mining companies are using our solution. In the US Raytheon have been distributing our product rebadged for a couple of years."

He added: "Our technology is very scaleable. We have trailer-based five site systems that mining companies can deploy those at different sites and we support some innovative ways of incorporating existing radio systems and that are of interest to mining companies."