The EU flagship project BroadMap is coming to an end now. The one-year project, which started back in May 2016, has gathered Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) organisations from 15 European countries (Member States and associated countries) to work together to establish a common roadmap for future evolution of EU PPDR radio communications.

With the background of Europe’s security situation, especially the migration crisis, the terrorists’ threats faced by a growing number of EU countries, but also the recurrence of cross-border natural disasters in Europe, the development of an interoperable system would facilitate EU communications and improve the effectiveness of emergency responses and ultimately ensure safer and more secure societies.

In that context, the project organised several national workshops throughout the summer of 2016 involving 276 PPDR organisations from 18 countries across Europe, gathering cumulatively more than 600 participants, representing practitioners from national police forces, fire brigades, emergency medical services, customs authorities, military, traffic agencies, mountain rescue services, port authorities, coast guards, as well as national Ministries of Interior and Defence.

This exercise led to the widest study on practitioners’ needs and requirements with regard to the future of their mobile technologies ever carried out at EU level! The BroadMap study also was used to fuel the work on standardisation for mission critical mobile broadband applications/services, networks and devices for both 4G and 5G technologies, carried out by the standardisation body 3GPP.

After this first step, the project entered into the requirements validation phase which built on the workshops’ outcomes as well as on the outputs of previous studies and other EU-funded projects. The result was the production of a knowledge database which identifies priority requirements and grouped them into topics of interoperability, security, devices, applications and network.

The transformation of these requirements into technical specifications, as well as the next phases of the project towards the definition of Candidate Solutions and organisation schemes, and ultimately the production of Transition Roadmaps, were presented during a Stakeholders’ Workshop which took place on November 2016 in Brussels. This workshop already demonstrated the strong interest from practitioners for the project’ developments and planned outcomes!

Since then, the project partners have successfully completed their tasks, and have secured the production of the Transition Roadmaps. A Final Stakeholder Workshop will now take place on 6th April 2017 in Brussels to present the final outcomes of the BroadMap project, and provide information on the next steps after the end of the project, in particular how the work carried out by BroadMap has fuelled the Commission’s Pre-Commercial Procurement call for solutions to enable EU Interoperable Broadband for PPDR.

During this Final Stakeholder Workshop, more than 100 participants representing PPDR practitioners, companies and research centers/universities will have the chance to participate to an event which will contribute to shape the way for the future of EU emergency communications & responses!

You can find the Programme of the event here!

The BroadMap consortium.