Public Safety Communication Europe
PSCE
PSCE is a permanent autonomous organisation, working to foster, by consensus building, excellence in the development and use of public safety communication and information management systems.
ID: 020457430494-14
Lobbying Activity
Response to Digital Networks Act
10 Jul 2025
PSCE fully supports the initiative to develop the Digital Networks Act. We particularly welcome the consideration to include more than only the economic considerations which have been the focus of the innovation drive for mobile communication until recently. The limited deployment of 5G across Europe provides a clear example of the failure of economic market drivers to take on the outcome of significant investment in mobile innovation and standardisation of 5G. The prospect of 6G will surely follow a similar path if only economic factors are considered. The EECC must also be adapted to the new technology evolution that is moving fast, and provides the necessary tools and mechanisms to provide Europe with an adaptable and flexible thus protective legal environment. Here, all dimensions of safety, security, resilience and sustainability should be considered. Key Values to improve societal resilience aspects must be understood and become as important qualitative drivers to complement the traditional view on economic quantitative values. This builds the need for critical digital network infrastructure resilience. Continued innovation must continue at pace, with the deployment environment suitable for agile and continuous upgrade, as innovation matures to improve societal resilience for Europe. Digital networks must be continuously updated to address and mitigate new challenges which may compromise our networks, services and information exchange. At PSCE we focus on the continued improvement of mobile communication to support those who work tirelessly to keep us safe and secure. Our responders work to keep us safe when disaster hits, in the fight against crime and terrorism, and with more challenges posed with war zones around the periphery of Europe. This includes the increasing risks posed by the climate change as the past years have demonstrated. European responders are today using 20-25 year old narrowband mobile radio technology. It is now time to build new capabilities to leverage the commercial scale of state of the art mobile communication technology, sharing multi media, enhancing the crucial audio communication, and providing enhanced shared situational awareness. This facilitates more efficient response of all responders across all disciplines and regions in the face of disaster, and in their fight against crime and terrorism. In increasingly challenging times for our community, its crucial that our digital networks are fit for purpose, improving societal resilience, building secure and resilient connectivity and services. The DNA must support establishment of the European Critical Communication System (EUCCS). EUCCS will provide a more resilient and secure mobile communication capability. Building on EUCCS, this capability will offer more resilient and secure services for all users, for critical infrastructures that keep us moving (eg rail and automotive) and that provide energy, and of course for consumers and business users. The management of spectrum must be more agile and harmonised across Europe. This has left our public safety community without harmonised spectrum for the realisation of EUCCS. Civil protection and public safety must be strengthened to meet all these challenges. Beyond this new mission critical communication mobile networks and its standardised services, this is also the platform for onboarding cutting edge technologies like AI providing further benefit in situation awareness and decision making. Only when all first responders have the access to the same and necessary information, can the responses and decision on the responses be deployed in a consistent and efficient way. However, new technologies like cloud-based infrastructures and AI are often also met with some hesitation due to security perspectives and data ownership, but they also represent a huge opportunity as AI can be also a tool to detect and defend mission critical systems from attacks.
Read full responseResponse to European Critical Communication System
23 May 2025
PSCE fully supports the establishment of EUCCS. European responders are today using 20-25 year old technology which can only be used within member states in most cases. This limits civil protection and police cooperation across Europe and only allows for voice and short text communication. It is now time to upgrade to leverage the commercial scale of mobile technology, across Europe, allowing for rich media exchange, providing enhanced shared situational awareness, This facilitates more efficient response of all responder disciplines in the face of disaster, and the fight against crime and terrorism. EUCCS must build a secure and resilient mobile capability across Europe to realise Operational Mobility - the ability for responders to carry out their operations with mobile communication, wherever they are, whenever they need to communicate, and with whoever they are tasked to collaborate with across Europe. PSCE have coordinated projects BroadMap, BroadWay and currently EUCCS Preparation, which provides the technical and operation experience foundation. Many of our member state & practitioner partners and members are involved involved in these originating projects. Policy Option 2 is our suggested option. Furthermore, our younger community of users will adopt a more familiar way to communicate, having grown up with mobile technology.
Read full responseResponse to How to master Europe’s digital infrastructure needs?
19 Jun 2024
Our feedback primarily focuses on EUCCS (section 2.4.2), but comments are made for topics throughout the paper where and in the attachment. Without EUCCS: - Europe continues to rely on 25-30 year old mobile communication technology for safety and security practitioners. - An informational superiority imbalance continues, where criminals use the latest mobile information exchange technology (5G/6G), where our crime fighters use voice and short text (2G). - Shared Situational Awareness will continue to be fragmented and limited. Coordination and cooperation remains limited for responders who keep European citizens safe in the face of disaster. - Some countries will deploy their own national upgrade to mobile broadband, others will deploy mobile broadband more slowly, or not at all, leading to a fragmented deployment where safety and security practitioners are not enabled with Operational Mobility capability, and cannot cooperate across European borders. Further findings of our study of the white paper can be found in the attachment. It is recommended that the following points are considered while developing policy beyond this important whitepaper: - EUCCS must be a high priority (fitting under pillar III of the paper) to support EU member states who are in the process to update 25-30 years old national narrowband communication infrastructures (2G) to 3GPP compliant mobile broadband (4G/5G/6G). - EUCCS can become a flagship example (for other verticals) of how advanced secure and sustainable digital infrastructures fulfils a societal need and integrates the key capabilities that are subject of this paper: Land mobile communication, Satellite, Security (QKD, PQC), AI etc. The need for policy and legislation to support the current and future needs to maintain a sustainable EUCCS: - Sustainable security see additional information - Satellite and Land Mobile convergence Satellite and Land Mobile must work together in harmony for resilience and coverage. (Ref EU Space Strategy for Security and Defence section 4.1.3 IRIS2 can support the establishment of EUCCS) - Secure interconnect between Member State Mission Critical mobile broadband systems - integrating new 5G/6G must include 4G and fall back mechanisms to existing infrastructure for resilience and compatibility with existing systems. see additional information +1G, the confusion of 6G - Standards (both technical and operational Global/3GPP, Europe/ETSI/CEN, EU and national domains specific for Operational Procedures - Spectrum sharing commercial spectrum now with roaming. In future the European Commission should better coordinate the intervention of Member states to work towards future spectrum allocations that assure capacity for our safety and security professionals. - Capacity and Availability: of mobile services must be assured through both dedicated and shared infrastructure. Infrastructure should leverage commercial radio access and building upon this to increase capacity and availability across the entire geography of Europe. - Use of standardised Mission Critical products and services (3GPP and otherwise) supporting Operational Procedures of safety and security experts and responders: situational awareness supported by AI, augmented reality, digital twins, secure information sharing, etc. - Improved mobile devices to support operational needs of safety and security professionals. - Eco-system All stakeholders should work together: public sector, large industry, SME, research. Most importantly those who will use the technology and services must be involved in future innovation.
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