Data Centres Communication
Two Way Radios & Cellular Coverage for Data Centres
With a custom two-way communications solution from Digicom, you can coordinate teams across every hall and plant room, respond faster to faults and alarms, and keep tighter control of who is on site. From escorting contractors and managing access to monitoring critical plant and coordinating maintenance windows, clear and reliable communications will simplify your operations, keeping your facility secure and your uptime protected.
Data Centres & Critical Facilities
The building is engineered to block the signal you need.
Digicom Wireless supplies in-building cellular coverage and licensed radio systems for data centre operators, critical facility teams and the contractors who build, fit out and commission new halls. Australia is in a sustained data centre build-out, with much of the new capacity concentrated around Western Sydney and Melbourne's west, and every one of those sites has the same coverage problem the day it is enclosed.
The Problem
A technician in a hot aisle is effectively unreachable
White space is dense concrete, structural steel, metal racking, containment panels and cable tray. Every one of those attenuates radio frequency, which is exactly what you want for interference and exactly what you do not want when someone needs to be contacted. Mobile signal that is usable at the front door is often unusable a few metres inside the hall.
It is worse everywhere else. Basements, tunnels, switchrooms and plant rooms, generator yards, fuel bunds, the loading dock, the goods lift and the roof plant deck are all dead zones by default. A coverage assessment usually finds the failures are in the places people work alone.
Why It Matters
Uptime discipline has to apply to communications as well
Tier classification and uptime commitments push every dependency towards redundancy: two power paths, redundant cooling, diverse fibre. Voice is usually the exception. Teams end up talking over the corporate wireless network, a collaboration app or the public mobile network, all of which sit on top of the systems they are on site to protect.
A licensed UHF fleet does not share that fate. It has its own spectrum, its own repeater on battery backup, and no dependency on switching, routing, DNS or an internet path. When you are troubleshooting the network, that separation is the whole point.
- Motorola Solutions Platinum Channel Partner
- ARCIA & ACMA accredited
- ACMA type-approved equipment only
How We Specify It
Two separate systems, and the evidence they work.
Phones and radios are not competing options in a facility like this. They solve different problems and they are specified separately. The third piece is measurement, because a coverage claim you cannot prove is worth nothing at handover.
Phones: in-building cellular through the shielding
Getting mobile signal into white space and plant means distributing it deliberately rather than hoping a rooftop macro punches through. Cel-Fi QUATRA is a carrier approved hybrid active system that runs over category cabling with Power over Ethernet, which suits a building that already has structured cabling everywhere. For larger campuses we design a full distributed antenna system or in-building cellular instead.
Operations: a UHF fleet that owes nothing to IT
The operational fleet runs on licensed spectrum through an in-house repeater on battery backup. No switch, no controller, no carrier, no internet path. Talkgroups split critical facility, security, cleaning and escorted contractors, and an all-call reaches everyone in the building for an evacuation. We manage ACMA licensing and frequency coordination as an ARCIA accredited supplier, and specify the repeater and antenna infrastructure to reach the halls that matter.
Evidence: survey, PIM and fit-out testing
We measure the building before we design anything, and again after commissioning, so coverage is a documented result rather than an opinion. RF coverage and PIM testing finds faulty connectors and passive intermodulation in shared antenna infrastructure, and pre and post fit-out testing gives you a before and after record when a builder hands a hall back.
Book a Site AssessmentRecommended for Data Centres
Handsets for the hall, the plant deck and the site across town.
Critical facility teams carry a radio for eight to twelve hours in an environment where nothing is allowed to be a distraction. Slim units for the hall, a full featured handset for shift leads and plant work, and push-to-talk over cellular for anyone covering more than one site. All three are also available through leasing or from the hire fleet for a construction or commissioning phase.
Motorola SL2600
The white space handset. Slim enough to sit on a belt all shift and not catch on a rack rail, with a discreet profile for a NOC or a customer-facing hall. Text messaging suits environments where a voice call is not appropriate.
Motorola MOTOTRBO R7
The shift lead and plant handset. Dual-mic noise cancelling cuts through chiller and generator noise, the emergency button and man down options cover overnight work, and the full keypad handles a fleet with multiple talkgroups and escorted contractors.
Motorola WAVE TLK 100
The multi-site handset. Puts roaming engineers, remote hands staff and campus security on one talkgroup across separate facilities, without a repeater at every address or a licence for every site.
Independent by Design
During an outage, the network you are fixing cannot be the one you talk on.
Incident response is the test case. If the fault sits in switching, routing, power to a comms room or an upstream carrier path, then chat apps, softphones and wireless handsets can all be affected at exactly the moment the response team needs to coordinate. A licensed radio fleet keeps working because it shares nothing with the platform under investigation.
That independence carries into evacuation and all-call, where one press has to reach every person in every hall regardless of what the IT estate is doing. Alerts route through emergency alarm management, and lone worker and man down cover the overnight technician who is several closed doors away from anyone else.
For operators running more than one facility, Motorola WAVE PTX adds a layer above the licensed fleets: remote hands, roaming engineers and campus security on one national talkgroup, bridged into the on-site radio system at each address through radio over cellular.
- Licensed spectrum and a battery-backed repeater, separate from IT
- All-call and evacuation reach every hall on one press
- Lone worker timers and man down for overnight technicians
- Separate talkgroups for critical facility, security and escorted contractors
- WAVE PTX links multiple sites without a licence at every address
- Supplied and supported as a Motorola WAVE PTX Specialist
Coverage Layers
Four places a hardened building drops the signal.
Coverage is not one job. Each of these areas fails for a different reason and is fixed with different equipment, so we scope and price them as separate layers rather than one number for the whole facility.
Layer 01
White space and data halls
Racks, containment, cable tray and slab all absorb signal, and the people in there are usually alone at a rack for long stretches.
Layer 02
Plant rooms, switchrooms and roof decks
Chillers, generators, switchgear and roof plant are loud, hot and often behind fire-rated construction that stops signal dead.
Layer 03
Basements, tunnels and the loading dock
Below grade there is nothing to receive. Deliveries, fuel bunds, goods lifts and service tunnels need signal brought to them deliberately.
Layer 04
Perimeter, gatehouse and the wider campus
Fence line, gatehouse, car park and any neighbouring hall on the same campus, plus the contractors being escorted between them.
Common Questions
What critical facility managers need to know first.
Practical answers on shielding, licensing, live installation and the construction phase. Every one of these is a question we have been asked on a real site.
Why do mobile phones stop working inside a data hall? The construction is doing exactly what it was built to do.
Reinforced concrete, structural steel, metal racking, containment panels, cable tray and coated glass all attenuate radio frequency. A signal that reads as usable in the car park can be unusable a short distance inside the hall, and the loss compounds with every wall and floor.
Raising the phone in the air does not fix it. The signal has to be brought into the space on purpose, using in-building cellular or a distributed antenna system designed against a measured survey rather than a floor plan.
Should facility communications run over the corporate network? Not as the primary path. That is a shared failure mode.
Wireless handsets, softphones and chat apps are useful day to day, but they all depend on switching, power to a comms room, and often an internet path. If the incident you are responding to touches any of those, your response tool goes down with the fault.
A licensed radio fleet runs on its own spectrum through its own repeater with its own battery. It is the layer that keeps working when everything else is being investigated, which is why we specify it alongside cellular coverage rather than instead of it.
Do we need an ACMA licence for radios in a data centre? For an operational fleet, yes, and we arrange it.
Licence-free UHF CB channels are shared with the public and with every other business nearby, which is not suitable for security or critical facility traffic. A dedicated frequency needs an ACMA apparatus licence.
We are ARCIA and ACMA accredited and handle the application, coordination against nearby users and the ongoing renewal. All hardware we supply is ACMA type-approved for use in Australia. For a short construction or commissioning period, licence-free handsets from the hire fleet are often the faster answer.
Can coverage be installed in a live facility without downtime? Yes, with staged works and a change window.
Most of the work is cabling, antenna mounting and head-end installation, none of which touches the IT estate. Systems that run over category cabling and Power over Ethernet keep the intrusion into a live hall lower than a traditional coaxial install.
We work to your change process: hall by hall, out of hours where required, with escorted access and a documented method statement. Coverage is verified by measurement afterwards, so the result is signed off rather than assumed. Our free system evaluation is the usual starting point.
What do we need during construction and fit-out of a new hall? A temporary fleet, then a permanent design before handover.
From the moment the building is enclosed, the trades inside it lose mobile coverage. During the build and fit-out we supply hire handsets for the site team, which is the same approach we take on construction projects generally.
Commissioning is where it gets serious. Load bank testing, integrated systems testing and black building tests put people in hot, noisy, temporarily powered spaces on a tight sequence. That is the phase to have the permanent coverage design already agreed, because retrofitting antennas into a commissioned hall costs far more than installing them during fit-out.
How do we cover a technician working alone overnight? Lone worker timers, man down, and a control room that hears them.
Overnight and weekend shifts often have one person moving between halls, plant rooms and the basement with no one in sight. A lone worker timer prompts at set intervals and escalates automatically if there is no response. Man down triggers on tilt or absence of movement.
Both need somewhere to land, which is what emergency alarm management provides, and both need coverage in the space where the person actually is. That is the argument for treating the basement and plant areas as their own coverage layer rather than an afterthought.
Can one system cover several data centre sites? Yes. Local radio at each site, one national talkgroup over the top.
The usual design keeps a licensed fleet at each facility, because that is what survives an incident, and adds push-to-talk over cellular for the people who move between them: roaming engineers, remote hands, campus security and management.
Motorola WAVE PTX can be bridged into the on-site radio system at each address, so a national talkgroup and a local hall talkgroup are part of the same conversation when they need to be. This overlaps closely with how we approach multi-site facilities management.
Who We Equip
The people we supply inside a critical facility.
A hall is rarely occupied by one organisation. Operator staff, contractors, customers and builders share the same shielded space, and each needs a different level of access to the same system.
Critical Facility and Engineering Teams
The shift crew running power, cooling and mechanical plant. Their handsets need to work in the hot aisle, the switchroom and the roof deck, and to stay up when the platform they support does not.
Security, Gatehouse and Access Control
Perimeter, gatehouse, cage access and contractor escorting through secure halls. Duress and priority call are standard, and the specification lines up with our security and emergency response work.
Builders and Fit-Out Contractors
New halls, expansion pours and white space fit-out. A hire fleet covers the trades from enclosure through to practical completion, using the same approach as our construction projects.
Commissioning and Testing Teams
Load bank runs, integrated systems testing and black building tests put people in hot, temporarily powered spaces on a tight sequence. Coverage and lone worker cover are worth having in place before the first test, not after it.
Colocation Customers and Remote Hands
Customer engineers working in a cage, and remote hands staff acting on their behalf. Push-to-talk over cellular gives them a route to the facility team without being issued a licensed handset.
Cleaning, Catering and Facilities Contractors
Non-technical staff who still need to be reachable and accounted for in an evacuation. Usually the lightest tier of device, managed under the same facilities management fleet.
Measure First
Get a coverage picture before the hall is closed up
We will survey the building, show you where signal actually fails, and come back with a layered design covering white space, plant, basement and perimeter. Based in Sydney, working on critical facilities across Australia. Have a look at our case studies for comparable coverage work.