France: Etelm and partners win airbase threat detection challenge

A consortium of French SMEs, including Etelm, has been selected as part of the PRODEF challenge, which was launched in early 2019 by the Defense Innovation Agency (AID), to develop a solution to aid France’s military in the identification of threats to airbases and its response to these.

The proposed solution is based on a secure private broadband multimedia radio network, based on standard LTE technology that would cover a permanent or temporary airbase or an unexpected incident or crisis site and be integrated with a set of autonomous sensors that can be deployed quickly. This network will work in concert with an application that will aid decision-making through visualising data in an intuitive manner and provide advanced capabilities for field operations.

The companies involved are: 4G Technology (mobile autonomous video devices for threat detection), Etelm (4G radio infrastructure), Halys (LTE EPC core and SIM cards), Diginext (hypervisor 2D/3D/4D), Drone Protect System(autonomous surveillance drones), Sorhea – Vitaprotech Group (perimeter intrusion detection), CINES (cybersecurity), Cerbair (drone detection) and Mentor Consultant (technical and industrial architect).

According to Nicolas Hauswald, Etelm’s CEO, “The companies within the consortium are used to working together and most components that will be used in the project have already been tested with each other (and some deployed on the field). Field deployment of the overall solution is expected for next year.”