The project for the renewal of the communication network for the security and emergency services has reached a milestone with the announcement of the winners for its construction. Among them, Airbus and Caggemini, as well as Orange and Bouygues Telecom will implement this scalable 5G 4G network. The total market value is 900 million euros.
Modernization and unification are the watchwords of the RRF project (radio network of the future) of the Ministry of the Interior. Existing mobile networks for security (police) and emergency services (fire brigade, SAMU) date back to the early 1980s and 1990s and rely on solid but outdated radio technologies such as Tetra or Tetrapol. Beauvau then consulted to upgrade these networks to 5G scalable 4G.
Gérald Darmanin, Minister of the Interior, gave the names of the winners responsible for this project and it is the Airbus-Capgemini ticket that gets the biggest prize (540 million euros) from the tender launched in 2021, to the detriment of Thales. The two sides will deal with the architecture and integration of the network. It is Airbus’ secure communications division that will be called and supported by several partners such as Econocom, Prescom, Samsung and Streamwide. For its part, Capgemini will deal with the integration of the various bricks and a statement specifies that the SSII will also rely on partners including “Dell Technologies and Ericsson who will provide telecommunications services implemented on a virtualized infrastructure”.
Bouygues Telecom, Orange and Atos in the game
For the purely operator part, Bouygues Telecom and Orange were selected with a guarantee of excellent service quality and total resilience. The operators have committed to prioritize flows and additional spectrum to the commercial network. Finally, Atos has achieved a lot with a budget of 43 million euros for “the design and supply of the network information and management system, a key portal that will provide the interface with RRF users and the management of RRF.”
With this common 4G / 5G network, security and rescue services will get additional features such as video calling, live location sharing, sending electrocardiograms, etc. The selected actors now have 19 months to produce and test a first version of the RFF. It should be operational in 2024, the year of the Paris Olympic Games.
