Farewell Grant and Mike!, RSM Compliance highlights 2022 and RSM Policy and Planning highlights 2022
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Business Update – December 2022
In this issue
- Farewell Grant and Mike!
- RSM Compliance highlights 2022
- RSM Policy and Planning highlights 2022
Farewell Grant and Mike!
In January 2023, RSM will farewell two of our longest serving members of the Radio Investigations team.
Mike Baird and Grant Wheaton have both been working within Radio Spectrum Management since the early 1970s and collectively have over 100 years of dedicated service.
Mike and Grant have contributed greatly to the New Zealand radio industry and have been instrumental in ensuring that the RSM Investigations group has strong technical abilities and processes.
We wish them well for the transition into retirement and increased time spent on hobbies and other interests. RSM looks forward to catching up with them again in the near future and wants to let them know they will be missed!
RSM Compliance highlights 2022
2022 has been an exciting year for RSM, our team has been busy not only with business-as-usual tasks, but also working on special projects to respond to the industry needs.
This year, NZ had the honour of hosting the ICC Women’s World Cup and the Women’s Rugby World Cup, and our investigation team was there ensuring broadcasters and organiser were able to use the spectrum while New Zealanders enjoyed watching the White Ferns and Black Ferns win.
We want to ensure we continue to provide efficient and timely licensing processes. We are doing this by implementing ISO processes for the licensing team and launched the Radio engineering training project to ensure there are enough ARCs and AREs to support the licence applications.
RSM Policy and Planning highlights 2022
For Radio Spectrum Policy and Planning 2022 has been a busy year, with key achievements on a number of fronts.
We started the year with two major achievements. In February a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the Crown and the Māori Spectrum Working Group, the provision of 20% of all future commercial spectrum management rights to a new Māori spectrum entity. Also in February, we consulted on our draft Five Year Spectrum Outlook, which proposes five-year work programme priorities to assist in managing the growing demands that impact on the use of the radio spectrum.
In August we made the 5925 – 6425 MHz frequency band available for Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) under the Low Power Indoor (LPI) use and the Very Low Power (VLP) Indoor and Outdoor use regimes. We also extended the 57 – 66 GHz band to now cover the 57 – 71 GHz band. This is to support a range of technologies including Multi Gigabit Wireless Systems (MGWS) and International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT) on a shared technology neutral basis.
In October the Government announced it was intending to provide long-term access to national rights in the 3.5 GHz spectrum band through a direct allocation process. The direct allocation process was selected to accelerate availability of 5G to small towns. The details of this long-term allocation will continue to be worked through over the coming months as the Crown negotiates final contracts with the parties involved. We have also continued to work with relevant stakeholders to progress technical work related to 3.3-3.4 MHz, for non-national use.
