New Zealand quietly switched on one of the biggest pieces of its emergency backbone this week, and most people will never see it. From 1 July, a new government company called SafetyNet Critical Communications took charge of the systems that let police officers, firefighters and ambulance crews talk to one another and to their control rooms, whether they are working a routine callout or a full scale disaster.
SafetyNet is an independent Crown company, and it replaces the unit formerly known as Next Generation Critical Communications. Cabinet signed off in November 2025 on moving that work out of the New Zealand Police and standing it up as its own entity, and the new company became live on 1 July. Emergency Management and Recovery Minister Mark Mitchell marked the launch, saying the country needed communications that hold up when everything else is under strain.
“Responders need reliable and resilient communications for everyday safety and during emergencies,” Mitchell said. “SafetyNet will help ensure the people and organisations involved in protecting New Zealanders have access to the information and communications they need.”
The reason this matters comes down to what happens when the ordinary phone network fails. In a big earthquake, a flood or a bushfire, the mobile towers that carry everyday calls can be knocked out, jammed by thousands of people trying to reach loved ones at once, or simply overwhelmed. Emergency crews cannot afford to lose contact at exactly the moment the public needs them most, so the country has spent years building a separate, hardened system underneath the one the rest of us use.
That system is the Public Safety Network, and it is one of the largest infrastructure programmes running in the country. The Government has committed around 1.7 billion dollars over ten years to build and run it and to roll out new radios and devices to frontline staff, stations and vehicles. It is designed on a build once, use many times basis, so that hundreds of organisations can eventually share the same secure infrastructure rather than each buying their own.
The network has three main parts. The first is a new digital land mobile radio network, planned to run across roughly 500 sites nationwide, which will replace the older analogue radios that emergency crews have relied on for decades. The second is a set of cellular services that let responders roam across all of the country’s mobile networks and get priority on them, so a crew in a coverage blackspot can still get a signal by using whichever carrier reaches that valley or coastline. The third is personal alerting, the system behind the Emergency Mobile Alert messages that buzz on phones during tsunami warnings and severe weather.
For now, four agencies sit at the heart of the network. New Zealand Police, Fire and Emergency New Zealand, Hato Hone St John and Wellington Free Ambulance are the core users, and their chief executives will advise the SafetyNet board through an expert panel. The bigger change under the new company is that the door is opening to everyone else who does safety work. SafetyNet will offer its cellular services to other public safety organisations on a commercial, user pays basis, which could bring in groups such as search and rescue teams, council civil defence units, coastguard volunteers and utility crews who need to keep working when the power and the phones go down.
Mitchell said pooling that infrastructure was the point, describing the shared network as something that will “benefit all New Zealanders” because so many different responders can draw on the same reliable system instead of each building their own.
The company will be led by chief executive Steve Ferguson, who has directed the Public Safety Network project since 2020 and brings more than twenty five years of leadership across finance, energy, logistics and government. He said the job now was to bring the country’s emergency communications up to date.
“I feel extremely privileged to be leading SafetyNet on a mission to help modernise the communication capabilities of New Zealand’s public safety organisations,” Ferguson said. He added that the company would “build on our successful approach of strong relationships and collaboration to work with the sector and government.”
Board chair Rob Fyfe, the former Air New Zealand boss, said the groundwork was already delivering. “Under Steve’s leadership, NGCC has delivered the Public Safety Network’s globally leading multi network cellular services on time and on budget,” Fyfe said. The board also includes Deborah Battel, Glen Sowry, Greg Lowe and TJ Kennedy.
Much of the work is still ahead. The land mobile radio network is under construction rather than finished, and the full rollout of new devices to thousands of frontline workers will take years to complete. The cellular roaming and priority services, though, are already running, and it is those services that carried emergency crews through recent storms and flooding without the total loss of contact that can turn a bad day into a deadly one.
None of this shows up in daily life, which is rather the point. A network like this succeeds when it is invisible, when a paramedic in a remote valley still gets through, when a fire crew can coordinate across a hillside that has no ordinary phone coverage, and when the alert on your phone actually arrives in time to matter. The launch of SafetyNet does not change what those crews do. It is meant to make sure that, on the worst days, they can still hear each other.
You can read more about the launch on the Beehive, and about the wider programme on the SafetyNet and Inside Government New Zealand sites.
What do you make of the country’s emergency communications investment, and have you ever been caught somewhere with no signal when it mattered? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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