ACMA overhauls spectrum licence and device rego system

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) is transitioning off its ageing RADCOM platform to a new IT system for radiocommunications equipment apparatus and device registration.

Final migration of data and the cutover from RADCOM to the new SPECTRA Enterprise platform, built by German vendor LS telcom AG, will take place in the two weeks from May 11 to May 26.

During the migration, ACMA will suspend all registration processing. The authority recommended licence holders who need to renew their spectrum allocations to pay any due fees by May 4 for electronic funds transfers, or May 8 if using the ACMA online payment gateway.

The project is code-named Project HELM (Holistic Engineering and Licence Management.

ACMA has engaged Rohde & Schwarz Australia in a $7.7 million partnership to develop custom extract, load and transform (ETL) tools to migrate the data from the existing RADCOM platform and into SPECTRA.

"This was an iterative process done in data cycles over a period of months to ensure maximum data integrity with reviews and testing being undertaken at the end of each cycle," an ACMA spokesperson said.

The first phase of Project HELM - which began in 2011 - was completed in 2013, a year after it was initially scheduled to wrap up.

Phase one involved the implementation of spectrum licensing functionality in SPECTRA. It was used to support both the 2013 digital dividend auction and the re-issue of expiring spectrum licenses.

The second phase - which involves apparatus licensing functions - is to be completed in the second quarter of this year, ACMA said.

Broadcast licensing functionality will be completed by the second half of 2015.

LS telcom's SPECTRA is a modular system with web-based and desktop applications written in Microsoft's .NET development framework, an ACMA spokesperson told iTnews.

Its introduction signals the end of RADCOM, which has been in use since 1996.

RADCOM was originally developed in Ingres 4GL OpenROAD for the front-end application, the ACMA spokesperson said.

It currently runs on Oracle Database 10g, with additional tools written in Java to supplement the original OpenROAD application.

The spectrum management system has been running on Sun's SPARC hardware and Solaris operating system, the spokesperson said.