Life Critical
Systems
Station Turnout Infrastructure for the Department of Fire and Emergency Services of Western Australia — a proprietary hardware and software solution providing reliable real-time emergency dispatch communications across the State.
Fire Station Turnout in Real-time
Watch how the DDL system automatically coordinates station turnout across the Perth metro area — from the first 000 call to crew mobilisation.
Emergency dispatch that cannot fail
The Department of Fire and Emergency Services of Western Australia operates from over a hundred stations distributed across one of the world’s largest geographic jurisdictions — from metropolitan Perth to the most remote regional communities in the state.
When a call comes in to the State Operations Centre, that instruction must reach the relevant station immediately and unambiguously — triggering alarms, displaying incident details, opening bay doors and initiating crew turnout — often within seconds of the original emergency call being received.
The challenge is systemic: WAN connectivity across regional WA is inherently unreliable. Fixed infrastructure fails. Microwave links go down. Satellite links introduce latency. A turnout system dependent on a live network connection is a turnout system that will eventually fail to deliver a life-critical message.
Services — WA
A proprietary hardware and software platform built for resilience
Ubiq Systems designed and built the station turnout infrastructure from first principles — purpose-built hardware units installed at each station, communicating with a custom software platform managing the full dispatch lifecycle.
Resilient Communications Architecture
The system is designed to operate reliably over unreliable networks. Messages are delivered via multiple independent communication pathways — each station unit maintains local intelligence and can act on partially-received instructions, completing turnout without a live connection to the central system.
Purpose-Built Station Hardware
Each station is equipped with proprietary Ubiq Systems hardware — ruggedised units designed for continuous operation in a fire station environment. The hardware handles local alarm triggering, incident display, door control interfacing and status reporting with no dependency on cloud connectivity for core functions.
Real-Time Dispatch Software
The central software platform receives CAD messages from the State Operations Centre and manages the full dispatch workflow — routing to the appropriate stations, monitoring acknowledgement, tracking turnout status and surfacing real-time operational data to dispatch supervisors and station officers.
Built-In Redundancy
No single point of failure. Communication pathways are tested continuously. Station hardware can fall back to secondary channels automatically. The software platform is architected for high availability, with failover designed into every critical component. The state has relied on this system for a considerable period without critical failure.
Communications over unreliable networks
The core engineering challenge is the physics of western Australia’s scale. Stations in the Kimberley, Pilbara and southern wheat belt regions operate on WAN links that experience disruption from weather, power events and infrastructure limitations that metropolitan environments never encounter.
Our system handles this through a layered communication approach: primary path, secondary fallback, and local autonomous operation. A station unit that cannot reach the central platform does not become a dead unit — it holds state, processes locally-buffered instructions, and re-synchronises when connectivity is restored.
Acknowledgement is non-negotiable. Every dispatch instruction is tracked until confirmed receipt at the station level. Unacknowledged messages trigger automatic escalation — the platform does not assume delivery. This is the opposite of most network-dependent systems, which assume success until a fault is reported.
A long-term operational partnership
The State of Western Australia has relied on this system for emergency dispatch operations for a considerable period. We maintain the infrastructure, support the operations team and continue to evolve the platform as the department’s needs change.
If your organisation has a similar requirement — real-time communications, life-critical reliability, or large-scale state infrastructure — we’d welcome an initial conversation.
Get In Touch