EDACS

 *From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
EDACS stands for The Enhanced Digital Access Communication System, a radio communications protocol and product family invented in the General Electric Corporation in the mid 1980s.

The EDACS system architecture supported large communications footprints. By making the GETC's "trunk" among themselves, one GETC per channel, the system was designed to be inherently fault-tolerant. If one channel, or device, experienced problems, the others voted it off the network, and calls continued to be processed with the remaining resources. This provided substantial hardware reductions, and the required software efforts yielded a variety of unique features and options.

This was not a new concept in systems design, however, few other teams have embodied it cleanly into such wide distribution.

The EDACS system continues to be sold, and supports a sizable portion of the market today for the public safety, public transit, and industrial two-way radio communications field.

EDACS was developed in competition with Motorola's Smartnet trunking system. It claimed, and continues to hold, significant market share. GE teamed with Sweden's Ericsson, and the company became Ercisson GE, which was eventually sold to Comnet Ericsson. M/A-COM Inc., a holding of Tyco Electronics, acquired the asset (see OpenSky), and many of the original team members, some of their children, and even a few grandchildren continue to manufacture and support the product family.

Over 500 large-scale EDACS radio systems have been sold, with hundreds of thousands of radios