The Australian Communications and Media Authority (the ACMA) has extended its automated spectrum management system, SPECTRA from LS telcom, with LS telcom’s software tools for spectrum allocation planning, licensing and trading. The software was successfully used during the Australian 700 MHz (the ‘digital dividend’) and 2.5 GHz spectrum auction, which concluded in May last year and resulted in total revenues of nearly AUD 2 billion (EUR 1.35 billion) for the Australian government.

With the extended system, the ACMA will be able to plan future radiofrequency spectrum allocations and re-allocations; allocate and issue the licences; register transmitters and receivers associated with these licences; and trade or amalgamate licences. All processes are carried out fully automated, without any manual transfer of data between LS telcom and other third-party auctioning, CRM or financial management systems.

The ACMA’s enhanced system covers the end-to-end processes for allocation planning, licensing and trading. This includes the definition of spectrum bands to be released for auctioning, as well as the preparation of lots, in terms of frequency bands and market areas, to be exported to the third-party auctioning system. Based on the auction results returned from the auctioning system, the LS telcom licensing system generates the new licences, calculates the licence fees, issues the licences and manages the payment process.

“Using the new spectrum allocation, licensing and trading software we have successfully conducted auctions for the 700 MHz, “the digital dividend” band, and the 2.5 GHz band, and have re-issued spectrum licences in the 800 MHz as well as 1800 MHz bands. Not only were we able to significantly reduce staff hours to process spectrum licence allocations; we were also able to reduce the time for licence trading from one month to 24 hours with the system,” stated Karl Maftoum, Chief Information Officer at the ACMA.