ACMA Selects LS telcom SPECTRA for Managing Spectrum Licensing

LS telcom’s spectrum management and licensing system, SPECTRA Enterprise, is now fully operational at the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) after a multi-year implementation project.

The ACMA chose a SPECTRA Enterprise system from LS telcom to support, enable and enhance the ACMA’s spectrum management capabilities. The system includes software for spectrum licensing, broadcast license area planning and allocation, technical frequency assignment, device registration, spectrum auction planning, and apparatus license management.

SPECTRA Enterprise fully interfaces with the ACMA’s third-party auction, CRM and financial management systems, as well as the ACMA’s B2G (business to government) portal ALF-E. Over twenty-five radio communication services, divided into more than one hundred sub-services, are handled by the system.

Thirty workflows support the automation of sophisticated licensing, business and technical analysis processes passing through the different systems and departments.

Rohde & Schwarz, prime contractor and LS telcom’s partner for Australia for nearly twenty years, supported the ACMA team and LS telcom in the realization of the project with a significant contribution to project implementation and customer relationship management.

Mark Loney, Executive Manager of the ACMA’s Operations, Services & Technology Branch, confirmed, “The SPECTRA Enterprise system from LS telcom has increased the productivity of ACMA staff and provided Accredited Persons with the ability to lodge complete license applications on behalf of their clients. The integrity of license data has improved with the introduction of SPECTRA and the use of licensing workflows to process electronically lodged applications has improved processing turnaround times. With the SPECTRA Enterprise system we now have the infrastructure in place and are well-positioned to implement the government’s spectrum reform agenda.”

The Australian spectrum reform agenda provides increasing opportunities for market-based arrangements, including spectrum sharing and trading, as well as secondary markets, which the software system will support. SPECTRA Enterprise also produces the data published in the Register of Radio Communications Licenses, which the ACMA makes freely available from its website through downloads and APIs (application programming interface).

The implementation project finished with the final acceptance in May 2016. It was split into several phases. LS telcom experts brought in their broad expertise in data management and analysis, data cleansing and restructuring. They migrated all the ACMA spectrum data from several legacy systems into SPECTRA, which provides the ACMA today with one centralized master database and a single view of the national spectrum.

Dr. Georg Schöne, CTO and Board Member of LS telcom, emphasizes, “Completing this project for the ACMA, which included a mix of SPECTRA commercial-off-the-shelf modules and very specific customization to meet challenging Australian spectrum management requirements, adds to our long record of success, and that even with the geographical distance and time zone differences to the ACMA. Once again, we have demonstrated our capabilities in managing and realizing multi-phase, multi-dimensional projects as we have already proven before, i.e. at ISED Canada, Ofcom UK, BNetzA Germany, and several world-class regulators in the Middle East. As for all projects of this size, LS telcom has established a permanent local first-class support which is realized in a joint effort by our reliable local partner Rohde & Schwarz and us.”