Category: Telecomms sector

Telecomms sector

How science can help build a more resilient Europe

Agency News, Industry News, Power/Energy/Oil & Gas sector, Telecomms sector, Transport sector, Water sector
Enhanced data collection, more knowledge sharing and a long-term approach to risk will be key in strengthening Europe’s resilience against future disasters, according to a new book published today by the JRC.
Drawing lessons from the coronavirus pandemic and other crises, ‘Science for Disaster Risk Management 2020: acting today, protecting tomorrow’ explores how to protect lives, livelihoods, the environment and our rich cultural heritage from future disasters.
With input from over 300 experts, the book highlights the important role of science in preparing Europe to face the challenges that lie over the horizon.
Commissioner for Crisis Management, Janez Lenarčič, said: “As disasters defy borders the EU supports national action and promotes cross-border cooperation on disaster risk management – with the EU Civil Protection Mechanism being at the heart of this work. Using all data, science and lessons learnt available is vital to strengthen the collective safety and resilience against disasters in the EU and beyond”.
Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, Mariya Gabriel said: “The Joint Research Centre has long held key expertise in disaster risk management, spawning valuable tools like early warning systems and satellite mapping services, disaster risk studies and global risk models. The new book ‘Science for Disaster Risk Management 2020: acting today, protecting tomorrow’, is the latest of these tools: it shows how vital science is in helping us prepare for disasters, and how we can all work together to learn the lessons of the past and prepare better for the future.”
The aftermath of disasters can be learning opportunities, both in recovering quickly and dealing with the underlying drivers of disaster risk to avoid or mitigate similar events. This new book provides several examples and recommendations on how to grasp these opportunities to build a more resilient future.
Data is key to understanding the impact of disasters, and better managing them in the future
Events like the Fukushima accident in 2011 or the coronavirus pandemic show that, however improbable they may seem, disasters do occur and they can have a huge impact.
On a practical level, past disasters can serve to highlight weaknesses and trigger changes in the policy framework. For example, the forest fires of 2017 in Portugal caused a reassessment of fire management policies and led to new legislation to protect people and territory from forest fires.
To make the most of these opportunities, scientists need quality, comprehensive data and information gathered after a disaster to develop the right methodologies and tools. The book authors recommend developing a mechanism so that disaster loss data can be collected and used in this way.
A major challenge to collating and using data is that much of the damages and loss to cultural and environmental ecosystems caused by disasters can remain hidden when the value of these assets are not easy to define in economic terms.
It is hard to put a price on cultural artefacts or quantify what is lost when certain oral traditions and customs are no longer performed.
As a first step, the authors recommend compiling an inventory of the current state of cultural heritage assets in Europe, which can contribute to preserving that heritage in the face of disasters.
Taking a long-term view on disaster risk
The book also calls for a shift from a short-term, reactionary approach to disaster risk management, towards a long-term view that tackles the underlying drivers of risk - such as inequality, urbanisation, or climate change.
For example, the authors show how urban planning can play a key role in avoiding building in risk-prone areas like flood plains. Climate change also poses a challenge that requires a long-term response: sectors like European agriculture will need to deal with more frequent and extreme weather events in the coming years.
The book recommends actions such as supporting research groups from across different scientific disciplines to work together to find nature-based innovative solutions to societal challenges.
Sharing knowledge and working together to become more resilient
In today’s complex world and the many links between assets, sectors and governance levels, disasters often have an impact across countries and sections of society. It is therefore necessary that different stakeholders and groups share their data and knowledge to co-create effective strategies to reduce disaster risk.
One positive example of this came following the explosion of a fertiliser plant near Toulouse in 2001. It triggered a set of actions to engage local stakeholders in the co-design of strategies and measures to deal with technological risk.
By establishing local committees for information and consultation, people can now participate in the decision-making process and implementation of measures to prevent these risks, while also having an influence on land-use planning.
The book recommends education and training to raise awareness and build the capacity of individuals and communities to contribute to these efforts.
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IACIPP and Capitol Sign Agreement to Advance Worldwide Critical Infrastructure Awareness and Knowledge

Association News, Cyber Security CII sector, Telecomms sector, Transport sector, University/Research/Academia sector, Water sector
Capitol Technology University and the International Association of Critical Infrastructure Protection Professionals (IACIPP) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to develop a partnership that will extend efforts to improve the training and education of Critical Infrastructure Students and professionals. Both parties recognize a high demand for worldwide cooperation to increase the effectiveness of research, education, and activities in the critical infrastructure field of study. This MOU will facilitate the development of joint seminars, conferences, and training courses.
“As an Association we aim to deliver discussion and innovation— on many of the serious infrastructure, protection, management, and security challenges—facing both industry and governments. The ever changing and evolving nature of threats, whether natural through climate change or man-made through terrorism activities, either physical or cyber, means there is a continual need to review and update policies, practices, training, and technologies to meet these growing and changing demands,” said John Donlon QPM, Chairman IACIPP. “This partnership with Capitol Technology University enables both parties to develop and enhance objectives through education and training.”
A nation’s critical infrastructure provides the essential services that underpin a society. Proactive and coordinated efforts are necessary to strengthen and maintain secure, functioning, and resilient critical infrastructure— including assets, networks, and systems—that are vital to public confidence and a nation’s safety, prosperity, and well-being.
Critical infrastructure must be secure and able to withstand and rapidly recover from all hazards. Achieving this will require integration with the national preparedness system across prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery.
The International Association of Critical Infrastructure Protection Professionals (IACIPP) is an international association of practitioners and professionals involved in the security, resilience and safety of critical infrastructure, both physical and information infrastructure.
The IACIPP is open to critical infrastructure operators and government agencies, including site managers, security officers, government agency officials, policy makers, research & academia. The Association also aims to share ideas, information, experiences, technology and best practices to enhance these objectives.
Capitol Technology University, located in Laurel, Maryland, is an independent institution that has focused on STEM education since 1927. Capitol Tech, the national winner of the 2020 SC Media Award for Best Cybersecurity Higher Education Program, offers hands-on courses taught by industry experts that lead to undergraduate and graduate degrees in emerging fields such as Mechatronics Engineering and Artificial Intelligence.
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Why effective disaster management needs responsible AI

Cyber Security CII sector, Industry News, Telecomms sector
The use of artificial intelligence holds promise in helping avert, mitigate and manage disasters by analyzing swaths of data, but more efforts are required to ensure that technologies are deployed in a responsible, equitable manner.
According to UNDDR, about 1.2 million lives have been lost worldwide and more than 4 billion people affected in disasters that took place between 2000 and 2019.
Faster data labelling
Cameron Birge, Senior Program Manager Humanitarian Partnerships at Microsoft, says their work in using AI for humanitarian missions has been human-centric. "Our approach has been about helping the humans, the humans stay in the loop, do their jobs better, faster and more efficiently," he noted.
One of their projects in India uses roofing as a proxy indicator of households with lower incomes who are likely to be more vulnerable to extreme events like typhoons. Satellite imagery analysis of roofs are used to inform disaster response and resilience-building plans. A simple yet rewarding avenue of using AI has been around data labelling to train AI models to assist disaster management.
One challenge, he noted, has been around "unbiased, good, clean, trusted data". He also encouraged humanitarian organizations to understand their responsibilities when making use of AI models to support decision-making. "You have to ensure you sustain, train and monitor these models," he advised. Microsoft also wants to promote more sharing of data with its 'Open Data' campaign.
Precise decision support
AI is becoming increasingly important to the work of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Supercomputers crunch petabytes of data to forecast weather around the world. The WMO also coordinates a global programme of surface-based and satellite observations. Their models merge data from more than 30 satellite sensors, weather stations and ocean-observing platforms all over the planet, explained Anthony Rea, Director of the Infrastructure Department at WMO.
AI can help interpret resulting data and help with decision support for forecasters who receive an overwhelming amount of data, said Rea. "We can use AI to recognize where there might be a severe event or a risk of it happening, and use that in a decision support mechanism to make the forecaster more efficient and maybe allow them to pick up things that couldn't otherwise be picked up."
Understanding the potential impact of extreme weather events on an individual or a community and assessing their vulnerability requires extra information on the built environment, population, and health.
"We need to understand where AI and machine learning can help and where we are better off taking the approach of a physical model. There are many examples of that case as well. Data curation is really important," he added.
WMO also sets the standards for international weather data exchange, including factors such as identifying the data, formats, and ontologies. While advocating for the availability of data, Rea also highlighted the need to be mindful of privacy and ethical considerations when dealing with personal data. WMO is revising its own data policies ahead of its Congress later this year, committing to free and open exchange of data beyond the meteorological community.
'Not a magic bullet'
Rea believes that AI cannot replace the models built on physical understanding and decades of research into interactions between the atmosphere and oceans. "One of the things we need to guard against in the use of AI is to think of it as a magic bullet," he cautioned.
Instead of vertically integrating a specific dataset and using AI to generate forecasts, Rea sees a lot of promise in bringing together different datasets in a physical model to generate forecast information. "We use machine learning and AI in situations where maybe we don't understand the underlying relationships. There are plenty of places in our area of science and service delivery where that is possible."
Rakesh Bharania, Director of Humanitarian Impact Data at Salesforce.org, also sees the potential of artificial or augmented intelligence in decision support and areas where a lot of contextual knowledge is not required. "If you have a lot of data about a particular problem, then AI is certainly arguably much better than having humans going through that same mountain of data. AI can do very well in answering questions where there is a clear, right answer," he said.
One challenge in the humanitarian field, Bharania noted, is scaling a solution from a proof of concept to something mature, usable, and relevant. He also cautioned that data used for prediction is not objective and can impact results.
"It's going to be a collaboration between the private sector who typically are the technology experts and the humanitarians who have the mission to come together and actually focus on determining what the right applications are, and to do so in an ethical and effective and impactful manner," he said. Networks such as NetHope and Impactcloud are trying to build that space of cross-sectoral collaboration, he added.
Towards 'white box AI’
Yasunori Mochizuki, NEC Fellow at NEC Corporation, recalled how local governments in Japan relied on social networks and crowd-behaviour analyses for real-time decision-making in the aftermath of 2011’s Great East Japan Earthquake and resulting tsunami.
Their solution analyzed tweets to extract information and identify areas with heavy damage and need for immediate rescue, and integrated it with information provided by public agencies. "Tweets are challenging for computers to understand as the context is heavily compressed and expression varies from one user to another. It is for this reason that the most advanced class of natural language processing AI in the disaster domain was developed," Mochizuki explained.
Mochizuki sees the need for AI solutions in disaster risk reduction to provide management-oriented support, such as optimizing logistics and recovery tasks. This requires “white box AI” he said, also known as ‘explainable AI’. "While typical deep learning technology doesn't tell us why a certain result was obtained, white box AI gives not only the prediction and recommendation, but also the set of quantitative reasons why AI reached the given conclusion," he said.
Webinar host and moderator Muralee Thummarukudy, Operations Manager, Crisis Management Branch at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), also acknowledged the value of explainable AI. "It will be increasingly important that AI is able to explain the decisions transparently so that those who use or are subject to the outcome of these black box technologies would know why those decisions were taken," he said.
[Source: ITU]
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Africa’s Infrastructure Ministers Validate Africa’s Infrastructure Priorities for 2021-2030

Industry News, Power/Energy/Oil & Gas sector, Telecomms sector, Transport sector
Africa’s infrastructure Ministers convened virtually to discuss the Continent’s infrastructure priorities for 2021-2030 and to validate the outcome of the first extraordinary expert group meeting of the African Union Specialized Technical Committee on Transport, Intercontinental and Interregional Infrastructures, Energy and Tourism (STC-TTIIET) held on December 14, 2021. A large number of African Ministers and institutions actively participated. The AU High Representative for Infrastructure Development, Rt. Hon. Raila Odinga, also addressed the audience.
The Ministerial meeting has looked into the reports of the STCTTIIET experts’ meeting and the bureau of the STC TTIIET, the priority list of projects for PIDA PAP2, the roadmap, policy, and governance structure of the African Single Electricity Market (AfSEM), the implementation of the COVID-19 Emergency Action Plan for Resilience and Recovery and the African Road Safety Action plan of the Decade 2021-2030.
In his opening remarks, Minister of Electricity & Renewable Energy of the Arab Republic of Egypt, Chair of the STC TTIIET, H.E. Dr. Mohamed Shaker El Markabi acknowledged that the determination of the African Union Commission and stakeholders to move Africa’s infrastructure development agenda forward despite the challenges posed by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
The Chair further highlighted that infrastructure development is key for the attainment of Africa’s development aspirations captured by Agenda 2063 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the priorities lined up for the next decade speak to these continental and global goals.
H.E. Dr. Amani Abou-Zeid, African Union Commissioner for Infrastructure and Energy, emphasised the importance of infrastructure in Africa in the next decade as the backbone to the realisation of the much-needed integration and trade facilitation in the continent.
According to AU Commissioner, post-COVID-19 recovery requires the fast-tracking of Africa’s infrastructure development to improve resilience and improve livelihoods and economies. “The COVID-19 pandemic also accelerated digitalisation, exposed the gaps in energy in rural areas and highlighted the need to develop infrastructure that is smart, inclusive and sustainable”, said Dr. Abou-Zeid.
The AU Commissioner seized the opportunity to remind the Committee of the bottomup participatory approach and regional consultations conducted leading to preparation of the PIDA PAP2 and the AfSEM, calling on the AU Member States, Regional Economic Communities and Stakeholders to synergize efforts towards the realizationsof Africa’s infrastructure development ambitions.
“Annually, we have an infrastructure financing gap of between $60 -$90 billion. We need effective and efficient plans to mobilize resources to fund the identified PIDA projects.The long-term solution in my view is the creation of an Africa Continental Infrastructure Fund under the auspices of the AU to pool resources. Such a fund would focus on a combination of domestic sources and private sector financiers”, said the Rt. Hon. Raila Odinga, the AU High Representative for Infrastructure Development.
Infrastructure & Partnerships Division Manager at the African Development Bank(AfDB), Mike Salawou recalled that the bank has been the major financier of infrastructure projects in Africa by availing 7bln USD in the past ten years. “We have been actively supporting the first phase of PIDA and we will continue to support PIDA PAP2, recognizing the long-term effect it will have to spur economic advancement for the continent”.
Mr. William Lugemwa, Director of Private Sector Development and Finance Division at the UNECA, also appeals for ownership of the PIDA PAP2 projects, saying “African leadership from the highest political level is critical for the successful implementation of PIDA PAP2”.
In her closing remarks, AU Commissioner Dr Abou-Zeid thanked Member States, Regional Economic Communities, PIDA Institutions, and partners for their active participation and relentless efforts exerted throughout the processes of PIDA PAP2, the PIDA PAP2 guiding documents, and AfSEM policy documents.
The recommendations and declarations validated by the Ministerial meeting of the STC-TTIIET will be presented to the Assembly of the African Union Heads of States and Government for adoption at the African Union Summit in February 2021.
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One ICT regulator’s journey to 5th-generation regulation

Cyber Security CII sector, Industry News, Telecomms sector
The global regulatory and technology landscape is complex and fast-moving.
Regulators find themselves grappling with an ever-growing array of challenges, chief among them achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the 2030 deadline, now just a decade away.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s ICT regulator is no exception, as the country continues to prioritize the rapid growth of its ICT sector and pursue sustainable economic diversification as part of its Vision 2030.
But what is 5th-generation in the first place? And how is Saudi Arabia’s Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) planning to get there?
The evolving role of the ICT regulator
If we think in terms of regulatory “generations”, the first employed a “command and control approach”, which often took the form of public or national telecom monopolies. The second-generation regulatory landscape saw the opening of markets, facilitating partial liberalization and privatization of telecommunications. By generation three, we saw accelerated investment, innovation, and access opportunities emerge, with regulators placing a dual focus on stimulating competition while ensuring consumer protection.
Fourth generation features integrated regulation, led by economic and social policy goals. A 4th-generation regulator is one that ensures or is working towards universal access, consults stakeholders regularly, and promotes international and regional cooperation, equitable spectrum management, and stronger consumer protection.
Where do regulators stand globally?
According to ITU’s Global ICT Regulatory Outlook 2020, 8 per cent of countries now has holistic, forward-looking regulatory frameworks enabling digital transformation across the economy.
40 per cent of countries remain in regulatory generations 1 and 2, missing development opportunities and remaining disconnected from the digital transformation of their economies. While one third of countries have achieved G4, characterized by thriving markets for ICT services and the lowest proportion of unconnected populations, some have already set 5th-generation regulation in their sights. In a 5th-generation regulatory environment, collaboration among even more stakeholders is key to shaping decisions in a harmonized way not only within the telecommunications realm, but across a broad range of sectors now dependent on ICTs.
CITC’s regulatory transformation
With a guiding vision of a “connected nation for a thriving digital economy”, CITC is stepping up to meet the 5th-generation regulation challenge with an ambitious new digital transformation strategy. Their vision also emphasizes safeguarding the public, providing reliable service, ensuring fair competition, and balancing the diverse needs of multiple stakeholders.
Historically, the Commission’s mandate focused on regulating the telecommunication and information technology sectors. But the last two years have seen that mandate evolve to reflect a changing global regulatory and technology landscape.
The Saudi Arabian regulator has met the challenges of an increasingly complex regulatory environment with a series of initiatives, including, among others:
• Promoting investment and infrastructure development while ensuring access to high-quality services. CITC reported investing 15 billion USD in infrastructure, including meeting major deployment milestones on network infrastructure and quality. Mobile broadband download speed reached 77.55 Mbps in August 2020, and mobile coverage increased to 99 per cent of the population for 3G and 94 per cent for 4G, according to CITC estimates.
• Establishing a National Regulatory Committee that will bring together 8 core regulators to collaborate on ICT and digital cross-sectoral topics like blockchain, smart cities and digital platforms, and proactively anticipate emerging topics. Additional public and private entities will be involved as needed. This collaboration was set up to accelerate regulation-to-adoption and seeks to drive innovation, job creation, and investor confidence by promoting coherence and efficiency across Saudi Arabia’s ICT ecosystem.
• Acting collaboratively to deploy ICTs during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic reached Saudi Arabia, CITC collaborated quickly and effectively with telecom operators to meet the surge in demand for online access and data with increased speeds and data capacity, free services, expanded spectrum use, and enhanced network configurations and connectivity. This rapid response played a critical role in enabling remote work, business continuity, delivery apps, e-government services, and remote learning across Saudi Arabia.
[courtesy of ITU]
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ITU Forum addresses opportunities and challenges of 5G implementation in Europe

Industry News, Telecomms sector
“Just as 4G deployment was carried out across Europe with a strong focus on leaving no one behind, it is now our duty to ensure that an enabling regulatory environment sustains the deployment of 5G in a way that connectivity is leveraged by all and for all,” said Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Director of the Telecommunication Development Bureau at the ITU, as she welcomed participants of the ITU Regional Forum for Europe on 5G strategies, policies, and implementation.
The event was one of several milestones of the ITU Regional Initiative for Europe on broadband infrastructure, broadcasting and spectrum management.
Organized with the support of the Chancellery of The Prime Minister (KPRM) of the Republic of Poland, the Forum was opened by H.E. Mr. Marek Zagórski, Poland’s Secretary of State Government Plenipotentiary for Cybersecurity, who called for “connecting the unconnected” and “bridge the digital divide” as priorities in the context of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 10 on reducing inequality. Mr. Zagórski went on to highlight Poland’s achievements in the provision of high-quality connectivity towards an Internet Society by 2025, and called for the urgent need to address misinformation around 5G in Europe and beyond.
5G strategies and implementation dynamics
More than 50 speakers provided participants with a comprehensive overview of the status of 5G rollout, focusing on regional and national strategies and policies as well as other ongoing implementation challenges relevant to stakeholders in the Europe region.
The first day of proceedings saw context-setting interventions from the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB) and the ITU Radiocommunication Bureau (BR), both of whom recognized excellent ITU cross-sectoral collaboration. Regional organizations and industry associations followed by discussing key priorities for the region, including the importance of international cooperation, industry collaboration, and regulation creating the necessary incentives for 5G deployment to deliver social and economic impact as well as the challenge of radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF).
Sessions 2 and 3 offered a detailed picture of the status of 5G implementation both in EU and non-EU countries. Administrations and National Regulatory Authorities recognized the importance of the transition to 5G converging towards the notion of “connecting everyone and everything” and reiterated how international cooperation must ensure a consistent deployment of 5G across the region, especially in context of the post-COVID economic recovery.
In his second day keynote, 2020 BEREC Vice-chair Jeremy Godfrey highlighted the importance of sustainability and resilience in the post-COVID-19 world.
From the 5G commercialization and market development perspective, industry representatives from satellite, mobile and equipment providers noted in Session 4 that efforts and expectations should be placed in the business-to-business (B2B) rather than in the business-to-customer (B2C) segment, and should focus on innovation-driven public-private partnerships as well as on the industrial IoT environment enabling emergence of 5G applications and ecosystems.
During the Forum’s final session on the challenge of increasing public concern about RF-EMF, it was widely agreed that the focus should shift from the scientific evidence, which is already there, to elaborating new strategies for 5G and EMF risk communication, as some countries have already undertaken.
New publications, upcoming priorities and next steps
In the context of the Forum, and to prioritize topics for future consideration at the regional level, the ITU Office for Europe announced the publication of two background papers.
One includes a series of country profiles on 5G implementation dynamics in 18 non-EU countries in the Region, featuring the implementation of 5G strategies, frequency allocation, EMF regulation as well as private sector trials and commercialization at the country level. The country profiles are designed to act as a reference for decision-makers and as a platform to monitor progress in reducing intra-regional gaps.
The other background paper on 5G and electromagnetic fields (EMFs) responds to concerns of administrations observed across Europe by referencing scientific evidence and recommendations as well as outlining key challenges and open questions, including misinformation and the social and economic cost for societies resulting from holding back 5G. The paper aims to support administrations in their efforts to elaborate communications on 5G at the national level.
The virtual meeting also hosted representatives of international and regional organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the Nordic Council of Ministers, Eastern Partnership Electronic Communications Regulators Network (EaPeReg), the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) and a number of National Regulatory Authorities and ICT Ministries from both EU and non-EU countries as well as important industry associations such as the European Telecommunication Network Operators’ Association (ETNO), the EMEA Satellite Operators Association (ESOA), the European Competitive Telecommunications Association (ECTA), DIGITALEUROPE, and GSMA.
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Latest issue of World Security Report has arrived

Association News, Cyber Security CII sector, Power/Energy/Oil & Gas sector, Telecomms sector, Transport sector
The Winter 2020-21 issue of World Security Report for the latest industry views and news, is now available to download.
In the Winter 20-21 issue of World Security Report:
- Priority of Protecting Digital Critical Infrastructure Will Grow in 2021, by Chuck Brooks
- A view of Facility Industrial Control System Security, by Ron Martin
- The Need for Higher Level Strategic Approaches to Cyber Security, by Bonnie Butler
- Critical Infrastructure Protection Starts at the Perimeter
- Effective Security Options for Healthcare Facilities
- African Terror Groups ‘Rebrand’ as Islamic State
- IACIPP Association News
- Industry news
Download your copy today at www.cip-association.org/WSR
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ENISA Report Highlights Resilience of Telecom Sector in Facing the Pandemic

Agency News, Industry News, Telecomms sector
ENISA is releasing its ‘Telecom Security During a Pandemic’ report at the 32nd meeting of EU telecom security authorities. Underlining the current strength of the sector in the face of the pandemic, the report also calls for increased cooperation, as telecommunications become more and more essential for Europe’s society and economy.
the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) is releasing its Telecom Security During a Pandemic report, which gives an overview of initiatives and good practices in the telecom sector to mitigate the impact of the pandemic. The report highlights the resiliency of telecom networks and services during the pandemic, which sustained major fluctuations in usage and traffic. The report also points to the need for increased cooperation between the public and private sectors as the role of telecoms expands.
The COVID-19 pandemic triggered major changes in the use of telecom networks and services: employees are teleworking; students are learning online; people are communicating via video. Almost overnight, the telecoms sector became a lifeline for Europe’s citizens and businesses. The pandemic put the telecom sector to the test with traffic peaks and spikes, combined with a national crisis and difficult working circumstances. Peaks followed major announcements about the pandemic; spikes occurred after news of lockdowns and closures. The diagram below shows the correlation between COVID-19 cases and fluctuations in network traffic on a single timeline. This is an example of one provider in one EU country, but it is representative of what other operators in Europe observed.
The report is divided in three parts:
- Early response phase: The report assesses the steps taken by telecom providers in the early response phase when providers activated their business continuity plans and supported emergency communications and communications via public warning systems.
- From initial strain to the new normal: Telecom providers had to deal with major surges and shifts in usage and in traffic patterns from the start of the pandemic. Gradually, this stabilised and became “the new normal”. The report examines the changes in usage, traffic patterns and network performance during the pandemic, and provides various examples of how providers managed the increased network loads.
- Response by the national authorities and collaboration with the telecom sector: The report provides a brief country-by-country summary of the pandemic response by the national telecom security authorities in the Union. It also highlights examples of industry initiatives, collaboration initiatives and information sharing between providers and authorities.
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SAFECOM and NCSWIC Address Communications Dependencies on Non-Agency Infrastructure

Agency News, Industry News, Power/Energy/Oil & Gas sector, Telecomms sector, Transport sector
The world of emergency communications can be astoundingly complex, especially as additional capabilities and services become necessary to successfully deploy, maintain, and protect communications systems. Many agencies rely on multiple third-party entities to provide these capabilities, including provisioning of critical system infrastructure, cybersecurity, and other services. For example, agencies readily rely on commercial vendors for subscriber units or on commercial utilities for power supply. An agency and its contracted non-agency entities alike are vulnerable to events that threaten the uptime, continuity of services, operations, or resiliency of communications. Regardless of how unpredictable these events may be, agencies can take steps to be prepared when those disruptive events occur.
Using the depth of experience among their members, SAFECOM and the National Council of Statewide Interoperability Coordinators (NCSWIC) have published a white paper―Public Safety Communications Dependencies on Non-Agency Infrastructure and Services—outlining several techniques to prepare throughout the communications system lifecycle for challenges associated with such dependencies, as shown in the graphic.
Given the potential for disruptive events impacting non-agency partners, public safety stakeholders—including system administrators, public administration officials and decision makers, and other communications personnel—might benefit from understanding the potential complications or obstacles they may face when depending on outside sources for infrastructure or services.
To learn more about this document and other helpful resources, visit cisa.gov/safecom/technology
Author: Ted Lawson, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Joint SAFECOM and NCSWIC Technology Policy Committee Federal Lead
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NCSC Update Guidance on Principles for the design and build of in-house Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)

Agency News, Industry News, Power/Energy/Oil & Gas sector, Telecomms sector
A private Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is used to confirm the identity of users, devices and services hosted or connected to privately owned infrastructure.
This is an essential component of any system that uses a private PKI for authentication, as such it must be designed and built with great care.
This guidance provides a set of high level architectural design principles which can be used to design, scope or review a private PKI architecture.
Fur further details visit NCSC >> 
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