On 30th September, the largest Work Package of the BroadMap project consolidating and validating practitioners’ requirements has been completed and delivered to the European Commission.
This was the largest consultation of European PPDR end users ever carried out with the aim to validate and prioritise requirements for European interoperable broadband applications, services, networks and devices.
Previously reported figures were further exceeded during the final phase of the work package, with an impressive number of contributions from the whole PPDR community coming from 18 European countries. 276 organisations provided inputs, including Police, Ambulance, Fire, Customs, Army, Coastguard, Prison, Utilities, etc. More than 530 PPDR end user experts attended national workshops between May and August 2016, and many more provided inputs remotely.
We experienced a cycle of requirements, starting from the outputs of previous studies and projects, then including new requirements as discussion progressed. The result is a Prioritised and Categorised Knowledgebase, which identifies priorities for the 1000’s of requirement descriptions originally gathered and grouped into topics of interoperability, security, devices, applications and networks prioritising and balancing operational need with maturity. This Knowledgebase, which is not public, will be used to guide a future EC co-funded innovation procurement programme, which is timetabled 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. BroadMap partners are convinced also of the importance of liaising with standardisation organisations in order to synchronize as much as possible the ongoing work.
On 29 September, PSCE’s Chair of the User Committee, Manfred Blaha, was invited to speak at the Joint ETSI / CEPT / ECC Workshop on “Public Protection and Disaster Relief: Regulatory changes and new opportunities for Broadband PPDR” at ETSI HQ in Sophia Antipolis. He presented the approach and actual status of “BroadMap” to the audience of ca. 100 representatives of European regulators, PPDR practitioners, standardisation organisations and industry. The briefing fit very well in the framework of information about status quo and next steps in standardisation and regulation in Europe. It was preceded by information updates from PPDR representatives from the UK, as well as the “BroadMap partners” France and the Nordic countries (NOR, SWE, FIN), who spoke about their national PPDR broadband plans.
Now, end users and practitioners are invited to Brussels to join a one-day workshop where we discuss this and the next steps in the project.
BroadMap Stakeholder Workshop - 10th November, Brussels
The next steps will identify possible solutions to these requirements and the different transition roadmaps that may take each European country towards European Interoperable broadband for PPDR.
If you are an end user or practitioner who contributed already or hasn’t yet engaged with BroadMap, please register here