European broadband project reaches milestone

On 30 September, a Work Package of the BroadMap project was completed and delivered to the European Commission, the Public Safety Communication Europe (PSCE) body said in a statement released on 6 October.

The BroadMap project aims to collect and validate Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) organisations’ existing requirements with the goal of establishing a “core set of specifications, and roadmap for procurement, to achieve future evolution of EU broadband applications and interoperable radiocommunication solutions”.

This was the largest consultation of European PPDR end users ever conducted. Contributions came from 18 European countries, with 276 organisations providing inputs, including police, ambulance, fire, customs, army, coastguard and prison authorities, plus utilities and others.

More than 530 PPDR experts attended national workshops between May and August 2016, and many more provided inputs remotely.

The result is a prioritised and categorised knowledgebase that will be used to guide a future EC co-funded innovation procurement program, which is due to start in 2018.

A gap analysis was carried out with regard to maturity of standards and availability of related technologies. Materials will be used to generate new inputs to standardisation activity in preparation for the later innovation procurement steps.

The BroadMap partners said they are convinced of the importance of liaising with standardisation organisations in order to synchronise the ongoing work as much as possible.

On 29 September, PSCE’s chair of the User Committee, Manfred Blaha, spoke at the Joint ETSI/CEPT/ECC Workshop on ‘Public Protection and Disaster Relief: Regulatory changes and new opportunities for Broadband PPDR’ at the ETSI headquarters in Sophia Antipolis.

Blaha presented to an audience of around 100 representatives of European regulators, PPDR practitioners, standardisation organisations and industry.

The briefing was preceded by updates from PPDR representatives from the UK, as well as the BroadMap partners France and the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland), who spoke about their national PPDR broadband plans.

End users and practitioners will gather in Brussels on 10 November for a one-day workshop where the next steps in the project will be discussed.

Those steps will identify possible solutions to the different transition roadmaps that may take each European country towards European Interoperable broadband for PPDR.

The next PSCE conference will be held on 22–24 November in Athens, Greece. The main topics will be: border security – control and surveillance; natural disasters; transport security through telecommunications. More information is available here.