Among other activities, the EFIS-MG working group is responsible for maintaining the EFIS (ECO Frequency Information System) portal and developing/updating it in the context of the new spectrum policy of the European Commission and the Radio Equipment Directive (RED), Directive 2014/53/EU of 16 April 2014 (on harmonisation of member-states’ legislation concerning the market placement of radio equipment, revoking Directive 1999/5/EC), and particularly for revising and integrating the radio interface specification forms. It is also responsible for revising Decisions ECC/DEC/(01)03 on the ECO Frequency Information System (EFIS) and ECC/DEC/(03)05 on the publication of national tables of frequency allocations and utilisations (NTFAs), and also for the revision of ECO Report 05 on CEPT, ECC and EC deliverables, relation to application terminology specified in ECC Decision (01)03 Annex 2, and of ERC Report 25 on the European table of frequency allocations and applications in the frequency range 8.3 kHz to 3000 GHz (ECA Table).
The 41st meeting of the EFIS-MG working group was held last 27-28 March in Luxembourg, chaired by Stefan Mayer-Bidmon of Germany and attended by 13 participants, including 11 administrations (Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and Switzerland) and the European Communications Office (ECO).
The progress made in the EFIS portal since the last EFIS/MG meeting in September 2017 was discussed by the group, along with future developments. The following are notable:
- planned development of an application programming interface (API) for EFIS which will bring new functions, basically regarding data import and export;
- improvement of the update consultation log, specifically the update of information concerning Recommendations ERC 70-03 and 25-10;
- conclusion of the possibility of including the link between an application and the respective attribution;
- conclusion of the development of a new function to generate statistics on implementation of the fixed service recommendation in EFIS.
As usual, the administrations attending the meeting reported on the current situation of the updates they have made or plan to make in EFIS.
Proposals were made to revise annex 2 (terms of applications) of ECC Decision (01)03. Noteworthy was the remodelling of programme making and special events (PMSE) applications, the removal of the cordless telephone (CT) applications (CT0, CT1, CT1+ and CT2), new applications in railway mobile radio (RMR) systems and future railway mobile communication system (FRMCS), and the addition of the Earth stations in motion (ESIM), medical data acquisition and wireless power transmission (WPT) non-beam applications. These proposed revisions of ECC (01)03 will be submitted to the next WG FM meeting in May 2018 for approval and consultation of the administrations.
The ECA Table was revised at this meeting. In the 790-862 MHz band a proposal has been made to remove the current restriction for non-use in the scope of aeronautic mobile service; in the 3400-3800 MHz band a proposal has been made to remove the broadband wireless access (BWA) application as well as all references to decisions for that frequency band (the aim is to prevent defragmentation, given that that band is envisaged to become one of the pioneers for 5G), and the mobile/fixed communications networks (MFCN) application was added along with the respective ECC Decision (18)06 in the 24.25-27.5 GHz band. These proposals to revise the ECA Table will be submitted to the next WG FM meeting (May 2018) for approval for public consultation.
Following the workshop on the EFIS portal held on 19 September 2017, a questionnaire was produced with the aim of gathering suggestions to help improve the EFIS portal, specifically regarding its usability (more detailed information on the workshop as well as the presentations made and conclusions are available at ECO EFIS Workshop on 19 September 2017 http://www.cept.org/ecc/groups/ecc/wg-fm/efismg/news/eco-efis-workshop-on-19-september-2017/).
ECO Report 05 was also revised; it does not have to be submitted to public consultation, though it should be approved by WG FM at its next meeting in May 2018.
