Police Association president, Sergeant Randolph Wierenga said the upgrades are long overdue and will plug dangerous holes in the existing network.

"The network has been plagued with problems like blackspots, coverage, transmissions and we assume poor capacity since its inception," Wierenga said.

"The digital network and individual call functions were shut down because it was unreliable. It sounded like people were talking underwater."

"The system could not use open source software which restricted what technology could be used."

The Tasmanian government took ownership of the network from Ericsson last year after the vendor filed a lawsuit against the Police and Hydro Tasmania, a state electricity supplier which also uses the network, in March last year.

Ericsson accused the two agencies of a contract breach by overusing the network, while the police and Hydro counter-sued for failure to meet SLA maintenance requirements.

A 2005 survey of 428 Police Association members found 95 percent of EDAC users had problems with the system, a third experiencing failures several times a week.

About half of these were unable to call for backup and assistance, 36 percent could not communicate problems with aggressive offenders, and others had intermittent or no contact with RDS. Half of respondents said the system failed even in CBDs, and three quarters felt action was no action was taken by superiors to rectify the problems.

Tasmania Police are trialing a new Automatic Vehicle Location Project which will improve safety in a single-officer response.