BroadWay project delivers technical successes, but challenges remain for European public-safety LTE

An initiative designed to develop interoperable public-safety LTE connectivity throughout much of Europe continues to make technical progress, but several key practical aspects of real-world deployment—spectrum usage, business models and governance—remain unclear, according to IWCE 2022 speakers addressing the matter.

Airbus and Frequentis each are leading a consortium of companies through the third phase of the BroadWay project, in which solution pilots are being established and being evaluated for more than 230 tests. BroadWay is expected to be completed in September, and the results are expected to help inform future procurement decisions by individual European governments as they pursue the deployment of public-safety broadband within their territories.

Such nationwide systems eventually are expected to be linked in a pan-European system that will be known BroadNet, according to plans endorsed by the European Commission.

Robert Nitsch, vice president of public safety for Frequentis, said the technical aspects of BroadWay have gone well, in terms of both performance and interoperability when standards established by 3GPP—the body that oversees LTE and 5G technology. Interoperability between disparate systems has been proven, and the first MCPTT group call was executed in April 2021.

“So far, everything has worked out quite fine,” Nitsch said during an IWCE 2022 session conducted last Thursday. “Our conclusion for the whole thing is … that the technology is ready. [In terms of] the usage of different LTE and 5G networks—to combine them—there is no obstacle.

“What is key is that everyone applies the standard. Because otherwise, it won’t work.”

Nitsch noted that the European initiative is different than the public-safety LTE effort in the United States, where AT&T is the lone carrier building the FirstNet system.

“There is no such thing, like you have in the U.S., where you have a carrier spanning from East to West and from North to South [throughout the European Union],” Nitsch said. “We’ve got many carriers, and we have to bring them together. So, there’s a completely [different] approach that one has to take here.”

“There is a challenge for the future, but it’s not on technical side. It’s an organizational thing. In Europe, there are different countries, different cultures, different responsibilities. This has to be aligned in documents, in procedures, in how to work in the future together.”

Many of these key aspects have not been determined yet, including what spectrum will be utilized when the BroadNet initiative is implemented to support actual public-safety operations in the future, according to Peter Clemons, the president of Quixocity-EU.

“[BroadWay is] just a program that’s testing the functionality at the moment,” Clemons said during the IWCE 2022 session. “So, if the functionality is proven to be correct, then it’s a question of working with the European Commission, working with the relevant … national regulators to then assign spectrum–and assign a frequency band, hopefully, that will have all of the relevant chipsets, applications and services.

“But that will be work, I guess, during BroadNet. Those will be the kind of issues that will be sorted out during the final stage.”

Nitsch echoed this sentiment.

“We talked with these carriers, and the carriers joined our team, and they make it happen now [during the Broadway testing phase],” Nitsch said. “How it will work out later on, when this really gets procured, we will see. Like Peter said, the spectrum is by country, and the governments have to jump in and stuff like this.

“Right now, everyone is on board to make it happen and to prove it. But how there is real-life implementation later on, there is a lot of dependency.

Other issues that still need to be resolved include whether carriers will allow enough access to their IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), which session moderator Bob Escalle referenced as “sort of the family jewels” for carriers that often have been protected by what many industry sources describe as a “walled-garden” approach.

Jon Ander Fandino Lozano, interworking solutions manager for Nemergent Solutions—an MCX vendor that is part of the Frequentis consortium—acknowledged that carriers limiting access to their IMS would reduce the level of interoperability between systems under the BroadNet vision.

“If they don’t open up [access to IMS], you will probably lose some things,” Fandino Lozano said.

Clemons said governments should considers such matters “very, very carefully” when they seek to procure public-safety LTE systems for their countries.

Nitsch agreed that such issues need to be resolved, but he expressed optimism that a workable solution is within reach, because European carriers are not as proprietary in nature—or not allowed to be—as their counterparts in the United States.

“This is Europe,” Nitsch said. “There’s a big difference in what power the government has and what power the carriers have. It is not like the U.S. If it’s blocked by an organization or whatever, then you have to find another solution.

“Usually, the technical standards are there and designs are there. We have to allow to make it happen. If you block it or protect your turf because it’s your market, then the best will not come out—let’s face it.

“Disasters don’t stop at the borders, so we need to find a way.”