Ubiwhere participates in the largest pan-European project for mission-critical telecommunications

Eleven partners from eleven European Countries set the team responsible for the BroadWay project. From European Ministries (such as the Ministries of the Interior of Italy, France and Spain) to national entities accountable for the public order and citizen protection and agencies for first-responder communications from each country involved.  The team is called Group of Procurers, led by the Belgian telecom operator of emergency and security services ASTRID, and was responsible for selecting and assigning the project activity to the PPDR4Europe consortium.

Currently, each European country has its communication system for first responders and public safety services, which limits international cooperation. To solve this limitation, the BroadWay project seeks to enable operational mobility for public safety responders across Europe by linking the several mission-critical mobile networks, to work as one.

The main objective of BroadWay is to establish a pan-European interoperable broadband mobile system for public protection and disaster relief, for different entities of emergency response to communicate in an efficient, fast and reliable way. It will be possible to offer citizens a prompt response to critical situations (namely terrorist attacks, natural catastrophes, public safety issues, etc.), in which is essential that first responders are able to communicate, share and access relevant information regardless of their location.

The project is divided into three different phases, over which the several consortia compete with each other to rise up to the following phase. The project is currently in Phase 2, for the prototype development, which will be demonstrated by the Group of Procurers. Ubiwhere’s main role is to design and develop the support infrastructure for an application ecosystem following the SpiceNet reference communications architecture. This ecosystem will be based on 3GPP standards to allow all public protection and disaster relief organisations to use and develop systems based on commercial off the shelf solutions, which can be used and adapted to satisfy the needs of the purchasing organisation. This type of solutions it’s easy to implement with existing systems, with no need for customisation, meaning entities are able to integrate it with the entity or the country’s existing systems.

Ubiwhere’s responsibility is to ensure that the virtual infrastructure is prepared to instantiate and deploy third-party applications, across Europe, in a unified system. Applications must be able to communicate with each other, be interoperable, so they can be presented in a common interface. This applies to video applications, for instance, which must be capable of monitoring several spaces in Europe, to ensure fast communications to first responders.

To achieve this goal, Ubiwhere benefits from vast experience with interoperability from other national and European projects, towards the integration of data and applications of different domains in one ecosystem, so they can coexist, communicate and exchange information with each other. This is precisely its vision when it comes to cities, for instance. Ubiwhere uses standards and harmonises data from Mobility, Energy, Waste and other urban sectors so it all can be presented in one interface. Municipalities get a holistic view of their cities and become capable of making well-grounded decisions, while responsible entities from the several sectors can align their services with the citizen’s needs.