The Ministry of the Interior has announced an investment plan of more than 900 million euros to modernize the communication technologies used by the police, gendarmerie and fire departments.
Airbus and Capgemini, which won most of this gigantic call for tenders, will therefore be responsible for setting up the Radio Network of the Future (RRF) announced in 2017. The communication systems for police officers, firefighters and gendarmes date back to effect of the 1990s and are now largely outdated.
A long-awaited modernization
When this modernization plan was announced in 2017, the communications of the various departments of the Ministry of the Interior had already been obsolete for a long time. The new network, which will allow them to switch from 2G (!!!) to 4G, then quickly to 5G, should therefore represent a considerable leap forward. Indeed, the service, planned to quickly equip at least 300,000 civil servants, will not only offer better performance, but also and above all new functionalities.
Indeed, if the technologies currently used are similar, the tools are not always the same depending on the sector. Law enforcement and emergency services cannot therefore always communicate effectively. In addition, this aging equipment does not allow the sending of too heavy data which can nevertheless be important, such as a video, a geolocation or certain medical data. So many flaws that should be corrected with the arrival of the RRF. According to the schedule established by the Ministry of the Interior, this new network should be operational and used from 2024.
Selected French and European manufacturers
This huge investment plan should however remain mainly in France, since the main manufacturers selected are national champions in the sector. Thus, the European manufacturer Airbus and the French consulting firm Capgemini won most of the call for tenders. They will be responsible for the architecture and integration of the network as well as the security of communications. The RRF will then go through the antennas of Bouygues Telecom and Orange for coverage throughout the territory, and will even have priority over their other customers to be able to be operational whatever the situation.
Airbus thus proves that it does not only make planes: its division dedicated to the creation of this type of network has no less than 1,200 employees and has already developed them in more than 80 countries. But few of them were as ambitious and modern as the RRF. A manager of this branch at Airbus thus declared that at the completion of the project, France would be one of the most advanced countries in the world in terms of modernizing secure networks.
Sources: The echoes, Ministry of Interior
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