LTE  |  2021-09-21

Airbus Consortium Achieves step two of European BroadWay Project

Source: The Critical Communications Review | Gert Jan Wolf editor

The Airbus consortium successfully completed step two of the pan-European interoperable mobile broadband project for public protection and disaster relief.

The consortium therefore swiftly makes its way towards the third and final step of the innovation project.

The successful Airbus consortium solution itself has been tailored to fully meet requirements for public protection and disaster relief while enabling the mobility of first responders across Europe. These include the flexibility to adapt the prototype to various use cases and to enable communication using shared and dedicated mobile broadband networks while maintaining the highest level of operational efficiency, interoperability and cooperation that first responders need during their missions.

On top of the solution, the Airbus consortium offers overall project management, the overall solution design, the supply of various technological components - such as a Mission Critical Services system, amongst others - and will provide a number of innovations to ensure compliance to given BroadWay objectives and future BroadNet network.

“BroadWay is an innovation driven program to ensure interoperability by design for Pan-European collaboration, enhanced situational awareness, and security and safety for citizens and first responders” Eric Davalo, Head of Europe for Secure Land Communications at Airbus explains.

“We are extremely proud, hand in hand with our partners, to participate in such a program and believe it is of high importance to support the creation of a European ecosystem which aims to improve collaboration between responders from different agencies and is based on secure, mission-critical broadband technology and includes state-of-the-art technology such as applications, Internet of Public Safety Things (IoPST) and future evolution possibilities while remaining complaint with 3GPP standards”, Davalo adds.

The lead procurer, Belgian operator ASTRID, acting on behalf of a total of 11 procurers from different European countries, has evaluated the Airbus consortium solution as successful for phase 2. This provides the consortium access to continue and prepare its offer for Phase 3. Phase 3 of the Broadway project is scheduled to start by beginning of October 2021 and will run until end of September 2022.

The Airbus consortium is composed of Airbus DS SLC (France), Belgacom International Carrier Services (BICS) (Belgium), Proximus (Belgium), and StreamWide Technology (France). Pentatech (Poland), umlaut (Germany) and Proximus Luxembourg are part of the consortium as subcontractors.