The CIN was established by the NSW Telco Authority in 2021. The network works closely with emergency service organisations, the Telco Authority, industry partners and leading researchers to identify and develop “solutions that push the boundaries of innovation,” said a progress report covering 2021-2024 released this week by the CIN.

“There’s a strange paradox when there’s a disaster or natural disaster: Whether it is fire or flood or any other sort of natural disaster, there’s an increased demand for connectivity and typically that connectivity is threatened by flood or fire,” he said. “We spent the first year thinking about how we could best impact that particular problem and we came up with four areas which seem pretty obvious, but it was four areas where we’re not talking about spending a billion dollars.”

That includes improved data sharing between different parts of government, which became the SMODS Project, and what became the Rapidly Deployable Large Area Wi-Fi Project, which is currently being commercialised.

SMODS is the first known data-sharing solution to integrate the Data Sharing Framework developed by the Australian Computer Society, the CIN progress report noted.

RESILIENCE: The CIN is also examining technologies to monitor and predict disasters and power resilience, as well as cyber security.

“One of our longer-term issues is thinking about — how can we still depend on increasingly vulnerable or possibly compromised equipment without essentially creating a dependency,” Oppermann said. “So it’s paradoxical: We need it to work even though it could be compromised. We need it to work, even though it could be partially disabled.”

Commenting on the work of the network so far, Oppermann said: “What I’m most proud of is the fact that we really have tackled these problems and got people together who wouldn’t normally sit with each other to talk about the problem. And we’ve come up with two solutions so far in the SMODS and the Large Area Wi-Fi.”

“I think there are still some pretty fundamental challenges in terms of connectivity for regional New South Wales, remote New South Wales, and by extension regional/remote Australia,” he said. “So part of what we’re looking to do is see what we can take from what we have developed so far and whether we can really take it to impact the rest of Australia. And of course, there are other countries around the world that look like regional Australia or have areas that look like regional Australia.”

“We’re also thinking about how we can take best advantage of the plethora of new technologies that are coming,” he said, including the increasing number of LEOsat constellations.

“How to best take advantage of technologies which are providing connectivity that, for example, might be costly or might not be effective for the particular applications that are being used. And the ability to think through or to explore inexpensive, innovative solutions that best weave together the fabric of connectivity options is where we’re going.”

“I’m hoping that we can come up with things like SMODS or things like the Large Area Wi-Fi, where we take existing technologies or existing approaches and just package them differently. Invent a few pieces, invent the frameworks, invent the protocols, invent the antennas, but do things a little bit differently so that we really do have an opportunity to have substantial impact.”