The lead partner Iskratel, d. o. o., Kranj, and partners Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, national operator Telekom Slovenije d. d. and OSI d. o. o., have successfully completed the 5G Safety research project. This project was selected in 2018 in the public call for proposals “»Spodbujanje izvajanja raziskovalno-razvojnih projektov (TRL 3-6)«” and was partly funded by the European Union from the European Regional Development Fund and the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport. The successful completion of the project was also confirmed by the Ministry in the second half of June 2022.

The 5G Safety project partners focused their research and demonstrators on reliable 5G-ready communications, services and applications using new and improved interactive modalities for citizens and professional users of PPDR. We explored key enabling technologies and their maturity, and designed new architectures and business models enabled by the 5G platform. With the project supporters, we selected relevant use cases, presented them in the form of demonstrators to a wider professional audience, and validated them with them.

Telekom Slovenije’s results confirm that the 5G network meets the needs of public protection and disaster relief users, which include extremely high demands for security, availability, responsiveness and robustness. The transition to broadband networks can be expected to be gradual over the course of this decade, with a need to ensure interoperability of networks and the simultaneous use of both broadband and narrowband networks during the migration period.

For Iskratel, it has been vital to design a portfolio of next-generation dispatching solutions for operations centres, control rooms and command and control centres that comply with standards for operational communications, are implemented in a virtualised or cloud environment and can be offered as a service (Dispatcher as a Service). They are of particular value because they are in line with real user expectations and needs, and because of the proven capabilities of 5G technologies.

The project at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering has focused on mobile applications for emergency calls or emergency communications; such applications are already becoming a reality across Europe, as they can help users to communicate all the necessary information to the 112 centre more quickly, and video calling is indispensable, especially for deaf people who use sign language. A new standard in this field, PEMEA, has recently been established and is already supported by several EU countries and was used in the project.

OSI’s results have contributed, on the one hand, to ensuring the end-to-end information and cyber security of these solutions and to guidelines for ensuring operational security based on widely accepted standards and good practices, and, on the other hand, to respecting privacy, or a solution to protect all personal data through an audit trail logging system.

The results and achievements of all consortium partners to date provide a contextual framework for addressing the digital transformation of public protection and disaster relief in Slovenia in a holistic way.

Taking into account insights from the best practices of the most advanced technological and domain environments in Europe and beyond, the 5GSafety consortium proposes a maximally comprehensive and integrated, proactive, professional and synchronised approach of the state, which will bring not only societal but also economic impacts.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the project’s supporters, the Administration of the Republic of Slovenia for Civil Protection and Disaster Relief, the Faculty for Criminal Justice and Security at the University of Maribor, the Professional Fire Brigade Celje, the SRIP Smart Cities and Communities and ICT horizontal network, the Directorate for the Information Society at the Ministry of Public Administration (now a part of the Government Office for Digital Transformation), the Transport Institute, the Slovenian Digital Innovation Hub, the Slovenian Association for Electronic Identification and Electronic Trust Services, the Communications Networks and Services Agency of the Republic of Slovenia, the Institute for the Development of Inclusive Societies and the Institute for Corporate Security Studies, and the European Emergency Number Association (EENA) and Public Safety Communication Europe (PCSE).