Astrid

ASTRID is a government-owned mobile communications network for emergency and security services in Belgium. It provides critical communications capabilities to the police, fire services, emergency medical services and other public safety organisations, based on the TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio) standard for digital voice and data communications, and as an MVNO on Proximus to provide nationwide 4G coverage. TETRA was originally developed in Europe but is now used in over 100 countries worldwide and is specifically designed to meet the mission critical needs of first responder services.

Currently, ASTRID has more than 50,000 TETRA users securing more than 11,250,000 citizens in Belgium.

Following a competitive tender process, ASTRID selected Cerillion’s BSS/OSS suite to support its radio communications, blue light mobile, paging and dispatching services.

The Challenges

Facing increasing demands on critical communications services, ASTRID required a new BSS/OSS solution that would support the complex charging and billing needs of their business, including on-the-fly provisioning and billing of calls between radios owned by different emergency organisations that are collectively responding to an incident.

Key requirements for ASTRID included:

• Support TETRA service hierarchies based on organisations and organisation blocks, including specific communication rights and management access controls.
• Complex service orchestration and provisioning across the TETRA, Paging, Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) and Mobile Data Connectivity Server (MDCS) platforms, including multiple service-dependent parameters.
• Ability to integrate with Astrid's own TETRA network and an MNO supplier to deliver convergent services.
• Ability to create sophisticated rules-based discounts, sharing unused voice and short data service (SDS) daily allowances across an organisation.
• Data migration from legacy systems.