Over 65% of the entire Australian continent still receives no mobile signal, an area of mostly harsh Outback bigger than the entire European Union. Frequent dangers such as fire, flood, stranding, dangerous wildlife, and extreme weather are made far more hazardous by an almost complete lack of digital communications.

At the same time, Australia is the world’s biggest market for LandCruisers. Due to their legendary toughness, durability and ability to go just about anywhere, LandCruisers are the only vehicle you’ll see in many rural and remote places. There are over half a million of them in a country of just 24m people.

So how could we go beyond advertising and use LandCruisers to help solve one of the biggest problems in remote communities and reinforce our position as THE vehicle for the Australian Outback?

Once we had the idea of a roving emergency network, we engaged Flinders University remote communications experts to help develop the LandCruiser Emergency Network (L.E.N.) and device.

The result was a simple, inexpensive, signal-providing device engineered to use a combination of Wi-Fi, UHF and Delay-Tolerant-Networking (DTN) technology to turn vehicles into communications hotspots each with up to 25km range.

During emergencies, anyone within range can use the network to log a call or geo-tagged message straight from their ordinary mobile phone. Data is then securely passed between LandCruisers, on a store-and-forward basis, until it reaches a network base-station and first responders can be alerted.

Testing began in July 2015, with a full-scale pilot program initiated in August 2015 across a 50,000km2 area of remote Flinders Ranges.

This ongoing pilot is part of the larger project aiming to bring emergency communications to remote communities across Australia and around the world.