Tasmania police sign on for NBN upgrade

Tasmania's Department of Police & Emergency Management (DPEM) has placed a significant vote of confidence in the national broadband network (NBN) after signing a contract to upgrade its communications services to run on the evolving network.

The services will provide robust connectivity between state police stations and the Tasmanian government's core network; under the terms of the contract, over half the state's police stations will be online with the NBN by 2014.

DPEM took services from NBN retail service provider (RSP) iiNet, which assumes the role of preferred NBN supplier and will progressively upgrade the department's services over the next three years.

The procurement order was made under the auspices of the Networking Tasmania II agreement, which provides standard terms to help aggregate the networking requirements of Tasmanian government departments.

NBN Co's current goal is to have completed the rollout of the network in Tasmania by the end of 2015, at which point the island state will be the first state in which the network will be ubiquitously available. The company last year signed a $300m contract with Leighton Holdings-owned Visionstream to reach this goal.

iiNet, which has been supplying ADSL services to the department since 2010, has already worked with DPEM to trial the upgrade from its existing ADSL services to the new NBN infrastructure, retaining the in-place ADSL services as a backup network.

"Given the nature of our work, we couldn't afford for things to go wrong," DPEM deputy director of corporate services Todd Crawford said in a statement.

"iiNet worked with us to trial the upgrades while still providing backup DSL connections. This meant we could take advantage of the technology's speed and efficiency, while having the assurance of the backup network. This provided a crucial level of comfort during the transition phase."

To support the contract, iiNet has established a dedicated account team that will work with DPEM technologists to ensure the NBN services are being utilised as effectively as possible by Tasmanian emergency-services authorities.

Early indications are that the NBN is already paying off for Tasmanian police, with faster speed and reliability expected to dramatically improve overall operating efficiency.

"The NBN is already proving to reduce the time it takes our staff to complete online tasks, has increased the efficiency and speed of sharing information, and will ultimately allow our officers to be more mobile and spend more time on the ground in the community," Northern District commander Richard Cowling said in a statement.

"The significant increases in network speed available with iiNet's services will enable us to achieve, over time, even greater efficiencies through the use of the NBN, particularly in regional Tasmania."