Elancourt, 17th May 2022 – An Airbus-led consortium has reached a milestone by demonstrating the operability of its solution in Phase 3 of the BroadWay project to increase the interoperability of critical cross-border communications.
The BroadWay project intends to concretely show how it is possible for firefighters, police officers or emergency medical units to move from their country to another country while remaining seamlessly connected to their operational hierarchy and being able to collaborate with colleagues from another country on cross border missions.
After having successfully completed the technical feasibility tests during phase 2 of the BroadWay project the Airbus consortium demonstrated the operability of its solution during Phase 3. As such Airbus solutions allows the joining of groups from one MCX system to another and maintain harmonized quality, priority, and preemption profiles during roaming across mobile networks. Groups of practitioners from one organization can communicate with groups of practitioners from another organization with the same prioritized access to radio resources whatever the country they are in and without having to disclose end users’ details or operational detail of individual systems. Testing confirmed the performance and operational interoperability of the solution with a third-party system.
“One of the challenges addressed by Airbus in the BroadWay project was to define a concept that would allow this interoperability while protecting the security and control of each organization. It’s about protecting the end users' information while sharing efficiently a fully operational multi-media communication channel,” said Eric Davalo - Head of Sales & Program Delivery Europe at Airbus SLC.
Airbus’s participation in the European research project BroadWay demonstrates the maturity of Agnet, the new generation critical communications platform developed by Airbus. BroadWay fosters a pan-European forward-looking approach to shape and define standard based interoperable technical solutions.
Final pilot phases are planned during June/July 2022 which focus on the simulation of a forest fire in Ljubljana, Slovenia and the interception of drug smuggling in Kerkrade, The Netherlands. These pilot phases will involve practitioners from across Europe, mostly carrying out local response activities, and others cooperating remotely from different countries.
The Airbus consortium members for Phase 3 are Airbus DS SLC (France), BICS (Belgium), StreamWide Technology (France), VodafoneZiggo (Netherlands), Telekom Slovenia (Slovenia) and Latvia Mobile Telecom (LMT) (Latvia). Pentatech (Poland) and umlaut (Germany) are part of the consortium as subcontractors.
Funded by the EU Commission, the BroadWay project aims at preparing the future of public safety communications. BroadWay is led by the Public Safety Communications Europe Forum, which gathers representatives of public safety user organisations, industry and research and consist in a Pre-Commercial Procurement approach. The project includes decision makers from 11 Ministries and agencies responsible for providing public safety communication capabilities in their respective countries (Belgium, France, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Italy, Ireland, The Netherlands, Romania and Spain).
Contact for the press
Dominique Huard
Tel: + 33 6 75 24 55 62
dominique.huard@airbus.com
