With the debate about critical broadband still raging, an Italian start-up company believes it has come up with an interim solution. 

Athonet’s PriMo product, demonstrated at September’s PMR Summit and Professional LTE events in Barcelona, is a self-contained, transportable UMTS/HSPA/LTE broadband package. A key advantage is that the system can be deployed in as little as five minutes.

“We are here to show that LTE is already here”, said Gianluca Verin, chief technical officer of Athonet, at the show. “It is already possible to have some PMR functionality with this system. And what we are showing here is a transportable LTE network that can be used in operations for emergency.”

PriMo was deployed in Northern Italy after a serious earthquake earlier this year, and the ability to view real-time remote video proved extremely helpful for rescue workers. “We had 24 cameras, very high resolution, which were deployed for surveillance”, Mr Verin continued. “And it’s all over the LTE network. 

“We basically connect a little box with an LTE modem and the beauty of this system is since the core network is all compact there, all the traffic stays local.”

The company describes the system deployed in Italy as the first LTE application in an earthquake-affected zone. It was awarded a medal by the Italian President for services to sustainable digital networks.

Besides helping the rescue services, the system has also provided local inhabitants with Internet access, allowing them to communicate with the outside world. Mr Verin said: “We were able to place our system on a school so we could get some Internet connectivity from the rest of the world to that box, and that box was distributing it to the people in the tents.”

Karim El Malki, chief executive officer, added: “If you think about adding this alongside a TETRA network you can really do something useful. If you empower people with a new technology, it will be used and that’s what we saw on the ground.”