The Australian PHS Forum was established in May 1995 as a lobby group with one over-riding objective: to make PHS an Australian PCS technology.
In the three years since its establishment, the Forum has made considerable headway in the pursuit of this goal. Bringing together over thirty of the biggest names in the telecommunications industry, the Forum was important when it began just for the mere fact of its existence.

“It demonstrated to government and regulatory bodies the breadth of interest and range of parties with a stake in bringing PHS to Australia” says Brendan McManus, Chairman of the Forum and Director of NEC Australia.
“The fact we were motivated enough to establish an organization showed how utterly serious we are about PHS and our stance improved the credibility of the technology with the Australian Communications Authority (ACA) and the Spectrum Management Agency (now part of the ACA),” he says.
“Above all, the creation of the Forum made Australian industry realize PHS is a serious contender for a place in the market,” he adds. As a result of aggressive lobbying and promotional activities, a watershed was reached in December 1996 when PHS was approved as a PCS mobile standard becoming the first Japanese standard to be adopted in Australia by AUSTEL (now the ACA).
Brendan McManus, says this achievement has been the Forum’s “greatest success” so far. But how was it accomplished?
“We made regular visits to the ACA seeking their consent to write the standard and their approval for its adoption,” he says,” we also worked closely with the Spectrum Management Agency to have the band-plan for cordless telephones modified to include PHS.”
Since the introduction of the standard, companies adopting it have entered the market selling cordless telephone applications running PHS. NEC Australia has already sold more than 200 PHS systems running behind NEC PBX to a whole range of customers located in various situations such as supermarkets, warehouses, open cut mines, offices, university campuses and tourist resorts. Panasonic is also selling PHS cordless systems in Australia.
“We have done a lot of publicity promoting PHS as a next generation technology to stimulate demand and anticipation for product among the wider Australian public,” he says.
Promotion of PHS has been one of the Forum’s most successful achievements, with timely press releases regularly issued to key Australian media that have consistently grabbed big headlines nationwide. A promotion campaign describing NTT’s wristphone PHS as the “Dick Tracy phone” caused great excitement and was even noticed overseas.
“We receive constant e-mails and faxes about the ‘Dick Tracy phone’ from all over the world” says McManus, “it shows there is a lot of interest out there in new innovative technologies.”
The single most important objective for the Forum’s future activities is to continue negotiations in parallel with the Australian DECT Forum to have Australia’s cordless telephone service band cleared of microwave links so public PHS services and home cordless units can be permitted and established.
The Australian PHS Forum meets every six weeks mostly in Sydney and the gatherings usually consist of 12-15 people plus representatives of carriers who remain strongly interested in the future of PHS as a public mobile service.
Following the success of the Australian PHS Forum, other countries are following suit to set up Forums of their own. Three other PHS Forums have been established in India and Indonesia and the Americas. As the forerunner, the Australian PHS Forum is sometimes called for advice on strategy, structure and development plans.
For more information about the Australian PHS Forum, please contact Brendan McManus, Chairman whose e-mail address is:
Brendan_McManus@neca.nec.com.au