Public safety public authorities (including our buyers) are currently planning and deploying 4G/5G broadband mobile services for use by their responders, in many cases shared with commercial users. Public safety requires high assurance that their mobile information services will always be available regardless of location and environment. EGNSS services provide fundamental enablers to this goal.
Building and integrating technologies for improved response capability rather than only reacting to tragedy should be the priority for PPDR stakeholders. To this end, BroadGNSS aims to procure positioning solutions to fill the coverage and availability gap to provide reliable, trustworthy and highly assured communication for the fight against crime, rescue operations, crisis management, etc. to provide the local and national agencies better response capability where current fixed mobile networks fall short. This capability should include managing initial crisis response and then structuring plans to escalate efforts with international support. The communication capabilities (voice, video and data, the whole via individual, group or broadcast call), including all their related features, constitute only a small number of possible European broadband applications that should be made immediately available when infrastructure coverage is damaged or never there in the first place.
Help offered by neighbour countries during disaster events (e.g. earthquake, forest fire) or in the fight against terrorism (e.g. cross-border Police pursuits) is currently not without risk due to limitations in cross-border information exchange that must operate with the same levels of assurance and accuracy. Efficient and safe rescue operations rely on coordinated actions where communication with the rescue teams of different nationalities is essential for the success of these operations. BroadGNSS goal is to ensure that solutions developed will provide highly assured services for public safety responder practitioners, no matter from which country they are.
The State of the art currently reflects that only a small number of countries are already using broadband ‘rich media’ services for ‘non-critical’ public safety operations, and that many countries are preparing for a transition to mission critical broadband for PPDR. Now is an optimum time to advocate the application of EGNSS to support national adoption of mission critical broadband.
Each individual European country is largely working alone, solving the problems for their own country. The BroadMap project has already successfully brought these countries together. Evidence indicates that countries working together on this topic, to share experiences, has increased as a result. However, each country’s own adoption of broadband mobile communication and associated EGNSS support remains to be a national concern.
BroadGNSS addresses the gap in the state of the art and defines the common challenge to provide EGNSS applications to support high assurance mobile broadband applications and services and mission critical availability. This is a crucial requirement that must be deployable to retain support for European collaboration and operational mobility of first responders. No special configurations should be required.
It must just work!
