SDBR News : Technological change is accelerating and public safety agencies want to get up to speed. How do you see the evolution of critical communications over the next ten years?

Eric Davalo : New technologies and innovations are increasingly evolving, and are becoming easily accessible for use by the general public. If security agencies and public safety actors cannot get hold of such technology quickly, they potentially find themselves in a position of technological inferiority. It is therefore necessary to be able to make these developments available to them promptly with the necessary business adaptations for effective use by the latter. This applies to all technological developments in the field of secure communications and their adaptations for critical missions and public safety actors. Security and emergency forces must be able to use technology that constantly improves the wealth and relevance of information collected and at hand, both in command centres and in the field. This information can be collected from a variety of sources such as fixed or mobile video streams, biometric sensors or information transiting through social networks. It must be processed in real-time in order to immediately identify critical data. These exchanges must be made with a level of confidentiality, integrity, and availability tailored to critical needs. Airbus develops solutions to help security forces improve their understanding of the situation on the ground and get as much information as possible, using state-of-the-art technology.

SDBR News : Which solutions are you referring to?

Eric Davalo : 4G - and soon 5G - mobile technologies provide the channels needed to collect and distribute rich information. In order to meet the specific needs and requirements of public safety organizations, and in order to boost operational efficiency, they must be complemented by solutions like Airbus' Tactilon Agnet collaboration platform and application. The unique tool allows end-users to collect all useful and essential data for their mission. The users also have the possibility to share it in various forms such as text, image, and voice to other individuals, or a group. The way this information is collected and analyzed will certainly assist security and emergency teams with the use of artificial intelligence, whether it being to identify relevant items in a video stream, to automatically transcribe information collected during an incident, or to automatically explore specific databases. Thus, the field of critical communications will be constantly enriched by technological innovations both in the field of secure communications, but also in other areas such as artificial intelligence to enhance results, and the efficiency of missions.

SDBR News : Can you explain your vision for the Secure Land Communications programme unit within Airbus and the strategy you are pursuing?

Eric Davalo : Secure Land Communications (SLC) equips professionals with the secure communication solutions necessary to make their missions and tasks a success. This of course applies to public safety agencies such as the Police, Fire, and Medical Emergency Services. This is also true for professionals in organizations of critical importance, such as those in the transportation and energy sectors. The solutions developed by Secure Land Communications (SLC) aim to help customers in their mission-critical tasks and digital transformation. SLC's strategy contributes to Airbus' strategy of integrating and delivering solutions and services in a broader scope, beyond the aerospace sector, based on technological innovations in communications and data analytics. SLC already has a strong presence of its products and solutions in airports, and shares with Airbus its knowledge of airport players’ (airlines, airport security forces, and customs) needs in terms of secure communication and digital transformation.

SDBR News : In the columns of SDBR in March 2016, you told us about Airbus SLC: "Our long-term goal is to establish ourselves as the world leader in standardized broadband services for secure critical communications." Is this strategy still relevant?

Eric Davalo : First of all, the changes and demands we see with our customers all clearly show that there is a growing need for digital transformation based on very high-speed mobile communications solutions, 4G today - 5G tomorrow. This reinforces our desire to move forward in this direction. The proximity with our customers, all over the world, has allowed us to rapidly make available to them solutions that are now operational in China, Europe, the Americas and the Middle East. We continue to invest in this direction by integrating more and more advanced technologies into our solutions, which enrich our customers' operational experience and enable their operational efficiency for day-to-day missions. Moreover, in China we have recently demonstrated that our solutions perfectly support the first 5G networks. The applications, based on artificial intelligence technology that we have developed and integrated, allow the first responders to gain in operational efficiency during their missions.

SDBR News : Where do you rank in terms of new technologies and in particular with the arrival of 5G which promises to be more suitable for critical mobile networks (very low latency, very high speed, security and high resilience)?

Eric Davalo : Secure Land Communications (SLC) strives to make use of, and further develop, new technology that can help improve both our customers’ operational efficiency as well as the safety of professionals and citizens alike. In China, there are solid examples that our secure communications solutions, used operationally on Tetra and 4G networks, also seamlessly operate on 5G networks. Our secure communication service offering in Mexico, MXLINK, is based on the integration of our Tactilon Agnet mission critical solution, with a 4G network, thus enabling the activation of priority functions needed by security forces. Tactilon Agnet benefits from integrated speech recognition, automatic information searching, and decision support based on artificial intelligence technology. We are also working on IoT technologies, in close collaboration with Airbus, to provide our customers with enhanced situational awareness.

SDBR News : In the current context, how do you see the future of Tetrapol and Tetra technology in 2030?

Eric Davalo : Our Tetrapol and Tetra technologies provide critical low-speed communication services that perfectly match the needs of critical voice communications and short message exchanges, such as GPS location, for example. We still regularly win new tenders to deploy these technologies. As an example, I could mention the Airbus Tetra system which now equips the brand new Beijing airport in China. We also have many projects to renew existing networks with the aim for our customers to be able to use them at least until 2030. In parallel to the use of Tetrapol and Tetra technologies, complementary solutions are actively being developed. They foster and support our customers’ digital transformations and are mainly based on 4G commercial networks. They bring many new and innovative services and change the doctrines of use. Our solutions enable the effective integration of these different technologies in order to simplify user adoption and enable an implementation which is adapted to the organizational and operational principles of the security forces. This ranges from end-user equipment to tactical management solutions and integration in the command rooms.

SDBR News : Where do software, applications and technology interoperability for critical communication purposes stand in a world of data and artificial intelligence?

Eric Davalo : Artificial intelligence can bring a lot to public safety. We identified the following five themes as being the most promising:

• The automatization of repetitive or administrative tasks.

• Increased work performance in areas such as automatic image analysis (vehicle registration plate, facial recognition, etc.).

• Information and decision assistance for responders and command room staff.

• The identification of fraudulent behavior in cyberspace.

• Predictive applications, with special attention to be paid to this area to avoid a "bias" phenomenon.

SDBR News : How will users benefit from these technologies and what is their added value in the field?

Eric Davalo : The availability of these technologies will have positive effects if the tasks they have to perform are very clearly identified, if the solutions are integrated into a defined and implemented end-to-end modus operandi, and of course if they maintain the level of trust and legitimacy of law enforcement. The benefits are immediate for field users. Tasks such as entering data on a keyboard are replaced by speech recognition and automatic searching for information to then be shared with specific intervention groups. Thanks to this, the user can fully focus on his mission and have is hands and eyes free. This saves time, is more efficient and is, above all, safer.

SDBR News : What are your important developments and projects in foreign markets?

Eric Davalo : Concrete implementations of our latest innovations are visible from China to Mexico, through the Middle East and of course Europe. Many projects are operational or in implementation phase. In China, we have demonstrated our solutions on an operational 5G network. In Mexico, we provide a range of business applications integrated with our secure multimedia communication application within a global secure mobile virtual network operator (SMVNO) offering with a high quality of service. In Europe, we equip many organizations with our Tactilon Agnet solution, which is now also available in software as a service (SaaS) version.      

SDBR News : Do you plan to develop new business models and business lines in the near future (3-5 years)?

Eric Davalo : We have just launched a “software as a service” (SaaS) offer for critical communications on very high-speed broadband. The feedback received so far is very promising. We will focus our efforts commercializing these innovative solutions on a global scale, thanks to our commercial and operational presence on all continents. We are also the only secure virtual mobile operator (SMVNO) dedicated to security forces and able to offer a high quality of service in Mexico. We are working to adapt this model to other countries, taking into account local regulatory aspects and the way the different security organizations operate. We are also working on the use of IoT solutions for the world of public safety. It is an entire value chain that needs to be redefined in order to meet the challenges and needs of our customers. Simple, automatic, and comprehensive access to all kinds of public data, useful for sometimes highly fragmented public safety organizations, is also part of the new business and technological models that we are currently developing.

SDBR News : What do you think of a future migration from critical 4G networks to 5G, which promises to be more effective than 4G for critical mobile networks?

Eric Davalo : 5G not only improves 4G networks' latency and performance, but also provides so-called "slicing" solutions that ensure, over a given period, that the network and application resources are made available to a defined set of users. These solutions should provide public safety actors with a level of guarantee and flexibility at an optimal cost, due to the dynamic aspect of resource allocation. It is now necessary to develop and validate the adequate technologies in the field, and to adopt the right business models.

Secure Land Communications (www.securelandcommunications.com)

Secure Land Communications (SLC), an Airbus programme unit, offers advanced communication and collaboration solutions enabling its customers to gather, process, and deploy intelligence. Its portfolio is tailored to the needs of professionals from Public Safety and Transport, Utility and Industry (TUI). It includes infrastructures, devices, applications and services based on Tetra, Tetrapol and Broadband technologies. As the European leader and a key international player, SLC has customers in more than 80 countries and employs around 1,185 people in 16 countries.

Photos credits Airbus