Over the past years, the EC supported the normative and standardization environment needed to mandatorily deploy the public pan-European eCall service for all new models of vehicles homologated after 31st March 2018. However, since the service is available only to the newly homologated vehicle models, many EU citizen would have not immediately benefited by the service and therefore a complementary TPSP (Third Party Service Provider) service was introduced allowing the Telematic Service Provider to forward to the national PSAP the vehicular emergency call received and validated by their Operational Centre by means of an installed after-market telematic devices.
The Viasat Group pioneered these solutions and since 2015, with VEM Solutions, contributed to the national Pilot carried out by the EC projects HeERO and I-HeERO with the Italian eCall PSAP located in Varese. This experience enabled the Viasat Group to the fine-tuning of its own emergency call solution, now in operationon sosCall line. Regrettably, the European deployment of the eCall took much more than initially envisaged, the supporting network technology became obsolete. In order to address these limitations and extend the service availability, the EC started developing the NGeCall (Next Generation eCall) which, in addition of being compatible with 4G network technology, extends the availability of the eCall service to many other vehicle categories such as: motorbikes, trucks, buses, rider-based systems,etc. To that purpose, the EC funded a 2-years European project “sAFE – After-Market eCall for Europe” (https://safe112.eu/) aiming at developing the recommendations for standardization and testing the new solutions.
VEM Solutions SpA was once more part of the project team and, at the end of February, has been involved in the Italian Pilot test in cooperation with the Italian PSAP, Yamaha Motorbike Europe, Ducati and Piaggio. The tests allowed us to successfully test eCall originating from a Viasat sosCall device to a 112 number of the Italian PSAP with the Minimum Set Data (MSD) associated. The final results of the tests carried out by the sAFE partners were used to complete the final objective recommendations of the project.
Marco Annoni
Chief BU IoT Solutions VIASAT GROUP