• 70 million passengers and 500,000 aircraft movements per year at Ch. de Gaul airport
• Add in the terrorist threat and you have a highly complex security and safety problem
• 5G and open networking will part of the solution

Charles de Gaulle Airport at Roissy, to the north of Paris, is the largest international airport in France and second largest in Europe. It handles over 70 million passengers a year and more than half a million aircraft movements, which makes it the 10th busiest in the world. It is a city unto itself and, in these days of terrorism and cyber warfare, the security of airport comms networks is paramount. As Christian Regnier explains, Air France, (the French national flag-carrier airline) and other authorities and bodies have been conducting deep and detailed experimentation with LTE technology and using the results of their investigations to analyse 4G issues in areas including ground services, engineering, maintenance, network security and critical IoT apps and services. The data harvested and lessons learned will now be applied to the next phase of the process which is the deployment and introduction of 5G. Interestingly, "open networking" such as open source software, open hardware specifications and open APIs, plays an important and increasing role as the airline and the airport co-ordinate their 5G strategies.

Filmed at 5G World 2018, London, UK