BroadWay – Open Market Consultation begins. Paving the way for Pan-European broadband for Public Safety

BroadWay has released a Prior Information Notice (PIN) on the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU).

BroadWay is a team of 11 procurers from 11 European countries comprised of national ministries and agencies responsible for communication services used by 1.4Million public safety responders across Europe. They have come together with the common challenge to procure innovation activity to enable a pan-European broadband mobile system for use by our public safety responders.

BroadWay invites innovative suppliers to help the BroadWay Group of Procurers to better understand the state-of-the-art and market status of broadband mobile for public safety.

Disasters, Crime and Terrorism are not confined to geopolitical borders. Those who protect and rescue us, should be able to talk, share and access information, wherever they are, and whenever they need to. It is clear in these difficult times that we need to enhance European resilience to such threats; to enable our first responders with better communication technologies than the ones available to the bad guys, and with a resilience to cope with difficult crisis situations. Our responders save our citizens against the perils of disaster, crime and terrorism on a daily basis.

Briefing events will be held online on the 20th July and 9th August, with 2 briefing meetings to be held in Brussels, on 13th and 18th September. An online questionnaire will be open until 21st September to allow potential suppliers to give us their opinions.

To find out more and to attend these events, please refer to the BroadWay website www.broadway-info.eu.

About BroadWay

The European Commission signed the agreement in May 2018, and the journey has now begun to enable Europe with broadband mobile for public safety.

• 11 procurers from 11 European countries have agreed to carry out a joint pre-commercial procurement (PCP)[1] to find solutions to enable pan-European with mobile broadband technologies (smartphones) for public safety responders.
• At least 50 responder practitioner organisations across 17 countries will evaluate those procured solutions in a pilot system to be developed within the 2021 timeframe

Our procurement team represents 1.4Million public safety mobile communication users across Europe.

Over the next 4 years, the BroadWay procurement team will carry out a pre-commercial procurement that will seek to procure innovation, to create the new solutions needed to achieve the BroadWay common challenge.

BroadWay follows the success of the BroadMap project that first brought together a similar team to study what is needed from this pre-commercial procurement. A major success factor of BroadMap will continue in BroadWay bringing together significant proportion of Europe to work closely together to procure solutions to this common challenge.

We also seek global co-operation and have already established links with countries outside of Europe[2]. On 23-24 May, BroadWay Coordinator, Public Safety Communication Europe (PSCE) hosted its regular biannual conference in Brussels. This was followed by an international meeting, hosted together with FirstNet, US. This international meeting brought together 20 countries including our BroadWay team, national projects from individual European countries, US FirstNet, UK ESN, South Korea SafeNet, Japan, Canada, and Australia. The goal is to exchange experiences and lessons learned, and to understand more together about this €100’s bn+ market within which, for sure, industry should be ready to innovate.

For up to date information on BroadWay events, please refer to www.broadway-info.eu

For details of BroadMap, please click here www.broadmap.eu

Details of broader PSCE activities and conferences can be found here www.psc-europe.eu.

The next PSCE conference will be held on 4-6 December in Bled, Slovenia.

[1]               https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/pre-commercial-procurement
[2]               https://www.psc-europe.eu/news-events/news/345-global-government-leaders-forum-highlights-innovation-in-public-safety-broadband-2.html