Goodmill - Operational Security Through Ensured Connectivity

Project Information

OpSec

Grant agreement ID: 755919

DOI

10.3030/755919

Project closed

EC signature date 19 April 2017

Start date 1 February 2017

End date 31 January 2020

Funded under

• Secure societies - Protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens

Total cost

€ 1 939 625,00

EU contribution

€ 1 357 737,50

Coordinated by

GOODMILL SYSTEMS OY
Finland

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - OpSec (Goodmill - Operational Security Through Ensured Connectivity)

Reporting period: 2019-08-01 to 2020-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Goodmill Systems is a global market leader in critical broadband connectivity for vehicles enabling Public Safety and Security (PSS) professionals to utilise mission-critical applications and information on the go. The Goodmill w24e router meets the challenges defined in EC report on the suitability of Commercial Cellular Networks for Mission Critical Broadband, which are reliability, resilience, extensive coverage and price stability. The w24e router utilises commercial networks alongside dedicated networks and wifi to ensure continuous data connectivity.

Goodmill is the first in the world to provide seamless and reliable switching between the best available broadband data networks. This ensures uninterrupted connectivity even on moving applications PSS are using increasingly. For the European PSS end user this is a low capex and low opex market-ready solution that provides unparalleled reachability and uninterrupted connectivity to all data crucial for a successful mission. The need for faster data connections will increase and create strain for public administrations to invest into a solution. Traditionally this has meant a new dedicated network that can cost upwards to billions of Euro per EU state. Goodmill router is an alternative that guarantees connectivity now. Through the use of the dedicated networks, commercial networks, WiFi connections, and other routes for data transfer, the availability up to 99.9% can be ensured at all times on the field, depending on the country and available networks.

The OpSEC project aims at bringing an updated version of the router to market to answer the challenges in breaking to the US markets. Through technological development and piloting, a successful market entry will be guaranteed and a market share of 20% will be obtained by year 2020 and European standing is obtained on the US-dominated market.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

We have developed a new and modern multi-channel router product platform whose first member, the new w24h-S product was released on the 28th Feb 2018. Based on the extremely positive customer feedback we launched a new product development project (as a continuation) to implement a new indoor router model. As a result of that, the second member of our new product family was officially released in summer 2018.

A fully new operational mode to optimise and maximize the throughput of the mobile network system was developed. In that mode several parallel physical links are used simultaneously and traffic is allocated on those links by using traffic classification. First commercial version of that functional mode is now available.

This new product platform has proven to be very scalable, reliable and future proof so it will be in the coming years the foundation of our new product form factors. From those product versions already on the drawing board is a very ruggedized router model for outdoor use where water tightness and extreme shock and vibration resistance are required.

The new generation of our OTA (over the air) remote management system has been further developed. Based on the customer response the scope of that development was much expanded which in turn delayed the 1st official release of the new system version. It is now scheduled to May 2020.

As the US market was one of our main goals the priorities on the R&D development were emphasized based on that. This meant testing, developing and selecting transmission modules which support the US operator networks and WLAN features which are necessary for secure and high capacity WLAN traffic. Further we introduced a new advanced VPN feature which now fulfills the security requirements in USA.

The commercial part of the project was to search for partners with whom then to pilot the system to the end customers. This commercial partner search task was divided into two; the first covered USA (Americas) and the other one rest of the world. Both in USA/Americas as well as in rest of the world we succeeded in finding several capable commercial system integrator partners. Several pilots were then run in Europe and Middle East. In Asia our first pilot was started in 01/2020 with our new partner.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The program has shown already now an unseen potential of improving public safety operation globally. The Goodmill multichannel router is a true “Blue Ocean” concept by enabling efficiency improvements, operation excellence and new unseen applications to be used. As modern applications expand and develop, they require broadband digital solutions, and the construction of dedicated broadband networks requires dedicated infrastructure and huge public spending. This is particularly true in the case of public safety and security (PSS) applications, which are used in some situations where fast and efficient access to the internet can mean the difference between life and death.

During the project we have seen that the information interchange has become fully location independent and the amount of information has largely increased. At the same time the economic conjuncture development hasn’t been advantageous and more and more public security organizations have abandoned their conservative expensive ideas and adopted new more economic ones. This means that all individual officers will soon have persistent access to broadband in their daily work, built by using existing infrastructure i.e. commercial networks. Interchanging PSS information over the national borders will be normal routines soon. And in case of large incidents even civilian connections can be used safely and securely by officers.

The business model provided by Goodmill Systems can reduce or even eliminate investment into new networks while simultaneously improving data security, reliability, coverage and resilience. Due to this program we have already tackled the major part of the challenges of providing reliable broadband access that police forces, ambulance services and other mobile (PSS) operations need. With this new developed technology Goodmill can help to:
- Eliminate big infrastructure investment
- Remove dedicated frequencies and proprietary technology
- Reduce network upgrade investment
- Increase local availability support
- Create a multiple network approach and
- Establish ad-hoc network capability and IP-based applications when providing high availability data access to public safety vehicles.

The estimated savings as efficiency improvements can up to even 100 000 euros per vehicle, as estimated by the customers during this project! If all public safety vehicles would use the applications, the influence globally would be immense. There are estimated to be about 3 million public safety vehicles is the world!

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