By Glen Watkins, A/Manager Infrastructure Services, Department of Fire and Emergency Services, WA

Western Australia is the largest and most complex geographical emergency jurisdiction in Australia.  DFES is the single agency that covers career fire and rescue, land based and marine rescue volunteers, and emergency management functions, which is the broadest single agency mandate within Australia.  Ensuring all of the information and resources are connected and deployed optimally within this environment is an extremely challenging endeavour.

DFES has focused on innovating  communication methods to cover Western Australia’s  vast geographical area by utilising technologies such as:- Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites such as Starlink and OneWeb; deployable meshed networks; SD-WAN enabled routers that can bond multiple connections together; Radio over Internet Protocol (RoIP) to connect remote operators to radio networks; Vehicle as a Node (VaaN) technologies to improve situational awareness for operators in appliances and at incident control centres; improved aerial intelligence streaming solutions utilising large area meshed networks; and automated ingestion to provide rapid intelligence to response teams and capacity upgrades in remote locations.