EU BroadMap project concludes with final workshop
EU flagship project BroadMap, which took the first steps towards interoperable radio communication systems for public safety in Europe, has now come to an end.
The project gathered together public protection and disaster relief (PPDR) organisations from 15 European countries to establish a common roadmap for the future of radio communications.
There were several national workshops held throughout the summer of 2016, involving 276 PPDR organisations from 18 countries across Europe. They involved practitioners from national police forces, fire brigades, emergency medical services, customs authorities, military, traffic agencies, mountain rescue services, port authorities and coast guards, as well as national Ministries of Interior and Defence.
The exercise led to a study on practitioners’ needs and requirements with regard to the future of their mobile technologies. The BroadMap study was also used to fuel work on standardisation for mission-critical mobile broadband applications/services, networks and devices for both 4G and 5G technologies, carried out by the standardisation body 3GPP.
After this first step, the project entered into the requirements validation phase, which built on the workshops’ outcomes as well as on the outputs of previous studies and other EU-funded projects. The result was the production of a knowledge database which identifies priority requirements and groups them into topics of interoperability, security, devices, applications and network.
The transformation of these requirements into technical specifications was presented during a stakeholders’ workshop, which took place during November 2016 in Brussels.
Since then, the project partners have successfully completed their tasks and secured the production of the Transition Roadmaps. A final stakeholder workshop will take place this month in Brussels to present the final outcomes of the BroadMap project and provide information on the next steps after the end of the project — in particular, how the work carried out by BroadMap has fuelled the European Commission’s pre-commercial procurement call for solutions to enable EU interoperable broadband for PPDR.
During this final stakeholder workshop, more than 100 participants representing PPDR practitioners, companies and research centres/universities will have the chance to participate in an event which will contribute to shaping the future of EU emergency communications and responses.
Communication interoperability is vital to silo-free public safety comms
In many cases, basic interoperability is not enough — more regulations and new policies are...
Significant progress in improving Australia's network resilience
Australia is taking proactive steps to enhance the resilience of its telecommunications sector,...
Pagers and walkie-talkies over cellphones — a security expert explains why Hezbollah went low-tech for communications
By shifting to low-tech devices, Hezbollah apparently sought an advantage against Israel's...
