When the emergency number 112 picks up a call, five authorities are ready to help in the field: the police, rescue services, emergency medical service, Finnish Border Guard and emergency social services and crisis services. The Emergency Response Centre transfers the mission to the appropriate authorities who can be quickly connected to a shared Virve talk group and out in the field to help.
The new broadband Virve service for public safety operators is being built carefully and in stages. “We have made excellent progress, as a large part of the work has already been done. The situation could be compared to a building that already has foundations, walls and a roof – at this stage it already looks like a house,” says Ari Toivonen, Development Manager at Erillisverkot.
The legendary Michèle Mouton, a former rally driver, participated in Rally Finland in Jyväskylä as a member of the FIA safety delegation. She praises Virve, the Finnish authorities’ public safety network, emphasising the importance of radio communications in ensuring the overall safety of rallies.
Erillisverkot starts procurement of 3GPP compliant 4G/5G end user devices to be used in Virve 2.0 service. Procurement will be done by using a Dynamic Purchasing System (DPS).
Finnish authorities’ communications will gradually move towards the broadband and mobile era in the 2020s. The next generation broadband Virve service is an entity coming together like a jigsaw puzzle in collaboration with its users. How is the project coming along?
Erillisverkot Group and Airbus Secure Land Communications (SLC) have entered into a renewed Virve maintenance agreement until 2025. The agreement is a continuation of previous maintenance agreements and covers switching and base station technology as well as application maintenance and support services.
The development work concerning the broadband public safety network Virve 2.0, which is led by Erillisverkot Group is one of the most important governmental ICT project in the near future. Virve 2.0 is also a major leap at the international scale, since it makes mobile broadband services available for authorities in cooperation with the newly selected commercial partners.
Climbing on a Super Puma helicopter, on an Allegro train traveling over two hundred, and observing missions on a guard ship Turva. Reetta Siltasalmi-Kautto, service designer for Erillisverkot, has toured the Finnish Border Guard's facilities to learn about the authorities' activities. She utilizes the information she collects in the development of Virve 2.0, the next generation of the authority network in Finland.
For the first time, the Barents Rescue exercise brought together the networks of authorities in Finland, Sweden and Norway. The exercise showed that common talk groups can already be put into practice.
