Hungary has Selected COMSOFT to Provide COFFEE as their National OLDI Gateway

Budapest/HUNGARY, March 2011 COMSOFT will supply the Air Navigation Service Provider (ANSP) of Hungary with their OLDI FMTP/FDE Enhanced Gateway (COFFEE), thus enabling connectivity between aeronautical ATM centres in Hungary and other European countries. By April 2011 all Flight Data Processing systems in Europe must prove their capability to exchange OLDI messages via FMTP and TCP/IP in full accordance with European Commission Regulation 633/2007. However, many current implementations still operate on the legacy FDE ICD specification, employing the X.25 protocol, which is not compatible with the FMTP specifications.

As one of its major advantages, COFFEE is able to bridge the gap between FMTP TCP/IP-based and FDE-ICD X.25-based OLDI message exchange. By converting between these different message formats, the gateway enables transparent and fluent end-to-end communication between any OLDI system in Europe. Therefore it fosters full interoperability between new and existing systems by coequally avoiding costly upgrades of ATM equipment.

The new gateway system will represent the interface between HungaroControl's ATM systems and the Pan-European Network Service (PENS). The COFFEE product has already proven its excellent results in terms of seamless functional capability and reliability in previous projects. At the same time, the main challenge of this project is to meet the set delivery period.

The new gateway provided by the German ATC expert is based upon its market leading multipurpose gateway AIDA-NG, thus benefiting from the prestigious maturity and sophistication of the congeneric product. COFFEE is already in use in numerous European countries and as such it fulfils the EUROCONTROL Safety Regulatory Requirements (ESARR) for software in ATM systems.