New York-based Millicom Inc’s Millicom Radio Telephone Co has been granted a waiver from the US Federal Communications Commission that will enable it to offer customers a nationwide two-way mobile, data and voice communications network in the 900MHz radio band. Millicom says the waiver will enable Millicom to build the first nationwide, integrated dispatch service to provide both voice and data communications capabilities – when the latter is developed. Millicom currently runs a private two-way radio service, Specialised Mobile Radio. The service uses trunking technology, which is the automatic sharing of common communication channels among a large group of users. It can handle group and individual calls, as well as connection to the public switched telephone network. Millicom currently holds Specialised Mobile Radio licences in seven US cities – Atlanta, Dallas, Honolulu, Jacksonville, Orlando, Phoenix and Tampa Bay, and the radio network is now expected to to span 30. Each city will include one to six 10 to 20 channel high power basestations. The network will handle data transmissions in the digital format and voice transmissions will remain in an analogue format but both voice and digital data will be transmitted on the same channel. Millicom says the system should be able to interface with the public switched telephone network, enabling calls from a Specialised Mobile unit to a wireline telephone, a remote host computer, or a public database. The service should also accommodate remote data gathering and remote monitoring, used by alarm systems and utilities.
