Alcatel won a key contract with the European Commission (EC) to be prime contractor of an ambitious R&D project that could provide such organizations as police forces, firefighters and utilities with enhanced satellite-positioning solutions. The development project, called “Liaison,” is a 42-month project sporting a $27.4 million budget equally shared by the consortium and the EU.

Liaison also could boost Alcatel Space as it hopes to gain other contracts with the EC. Remi Challamel, project manager/Location-Based Services at Alcatel Space, told Satellite News, “The Liaison project covers Location Based Services (LBS) activities for the professional market. Alcatel Space is also present with its assisted-GPS technologies on emergency services (the SCORE Project) and in the mass market (already available commercial products). We intend to use this experience to gain new contracts (institutional or commercial), and to reinforce our position in the Galileo concession, because LBS is a key enabler of the future Galileo market.”

Impressive Project

Liaison itself is an impressive project, bringing together a 34-member consortium to develop LBS. Ultimately, users will be able to send and receive real-time positioning information using their mobile phones and other portable devices. Putting together a consortium has been far from easy. “The main difficulty was to identify and discover structural partners,” Challamel commented. “LBS is a complex functional chain, which requires many different intermediates. You need chipset manufacturers. You need handset terminal manufacturers, telecom operators, network-infrastructure providers, application-software providers and content providers. What is very important is to build structural partnerships in order to have commitment from different partners for R&D projects, but also for commercialization of the future solution.”

One of the key challenges will be to integrate the different parts of the service. Challamel admitted, “These solutions will be composed of different components. There will be handsets, network infrastructure, location servers and application software. Some of the components that are developed for Liaison already exist today as single, basic components. The mission is to improve the features and the functionalities of those components, and to integrate the different components in order to build an end-to-end integrated solution meeting end-users requirements.”

The actual project will consist of three phases. According to Challamel, “In the first phase, we will develop the core solution with functionalities in terms of indoor positioning. In the beta phase, we will extend the solution to have a solution compatible with professional mobile networks like WLANs and TETRA. For the last phase — the operational phase — we will develop additional features, including three-dimensional displaying, hybridization with inertial sensors and UMTS capabilities. We will have at the end of each phase a solution with richer features.”

He continues, “In terms of schedule, alpha-phase products and solutions will be validated in fall 2005, and the beta phase products and solutions will be validated in fall 2006. The operational products and solutions will be validated during the first quarter of 2008. This will enable Alcatel to propose different generations of assisted-GPS products with improved features.”

There will be various pilot projects to test the validity of the system.

(Laurent Zimmerman, Alcatel Space, [email protected])

Who’s Involved In The Pilot Projects?

• Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in Great Britain, to coordinate the field- operational teams
• Italian Fire Brigade, to coordinate Fire Forces during disasters
• The city of Rome, to enhance waste data collection
• TDF, the French broadcast service provider, to protect mobile workers
• Iberdrola, the Spanish electricity company, to enhance network maintenance and on-site workers efficiency
• Taxi companies in Athens, to support a “taxi on demand” service, designed to enhance the saturated traffic, and possibly develop a “taxi pooling” system.

Source: Alcatel