BOS Digital Radio - Again a Key Topic at PMRExpo 2018

BOS experts from Germany and abroad will discuss and give lectures on secure communications at the summit and in the Global BOS Forum. The trending topics include the future of the BOS digital radio network, alerting, control centre projects and the use of social media by the emergency services.

Future‐proofing BOS digital radio
The president of the German Agency for Digital Radio for Security Authorities and Organisations (BDBOS), Andreas Gegenfurtner, will give a talk titled “Our commitment to your network of the future”, in which he will mainly speak about the BDBOS making BOS digital radio future‐proof. This includes raising TETRA system technology to IP standard as part of the network’s modernisation. He will highlight the extent to which 5G digital key technology can create various new fields of application, such as telemedicine, for the BOS in the age of interconnection. Andreas Gegenfurtner will also reveal how his agency is actively integrating BOS‐specific needs into the standardisation of future technologies and will outline the importance of providing sufficient frequencies for security authorities and organisations.

Report on alerting, migration and signal coverage in buildings in the TETRA network
In his talk, Ralf Ackermann, President of the State Fire Brigade Association of Hesse, will evaluate the setup of the BOS digital radio network in terms of digital alerting, control centre migration and signal coverage in buildings. In Hesse, the decision has been taken to also carry out alerting in the TETRA network. He will reveal the consequences of this from the perspective of the State Fire Brigade Association: the network needs to be more densely built up, and redeveloping alarm devices will present a challenge. Reliability and redundancies, which still need to be created, will define how future‐proof the system is.

Hybrid alerting and additional functions
Rainer Buchmann, Head of the Saarland’s Integrated Control Centre, will give a presentation on “Hybrid alerting with additional functions for greater efficiency, security and cost effectiveness”. The background of his topic: fire brigades and aid organisations are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit sufficient voluntary workers. In order to avoid making excessive demands of the volunteers and even losing workers, it is very important to have targeted and precise alerting. Of course this kind of alerting brings tactical advantages, but there are also economic reasons for only deploying as many workers as is necessary. In order to achieve these goals, the use of extensively automated, bidirectional communication in the alerting process is absolutely essential.

Control centre pilot project beyond North Rhine‐Westphalia
Germany occupies a special role in Europe with its diverse decentralised control centre landscape, which complicates the data interchange between around 265 control centres when it comes to danger prevention alone. Against this backdrop, Peter Beckmann of the Interior Ministry of North Rhine‐Westphalia will talk about “Prospects and standards for consistent situation reporting.” He will describe perspectives and approaches for organising and standardising the exchange of situation‐ relevant data between control centres. The focus here will be on the approach to achieve anti‐ discriminatory, cost‐effective exchange of situation‐relevant data with a consistent data model and a technical (industry) standard and testing this in a new pilot project in and beyond North Rhine‐ Westphalia.

Social media and emergency call apps
Social media and emergency call apps have long been an everyday tool for the BOS. Bernhard Harz of the Berlin Fire Brigade will assess the advantages and disadvantages of this in his talk “Social media and emergency call apps: Image versus secure communication”.