Sophia Antipolis, 5 July 2018

MCPTT becomes MCX – Mission Critical Services – as vendors move beyond voice

The capabilities of Mission Critical Push to Talk (MCPTT), Mission Critical Data (MCDATA) and Mission Critical Video (MCVIDEO) were put to the test during a week-long event of intensive testing of more than 300 combinations of vendors and equipment, based on 3GPP Release 14.

The second ETSI MCPTT Plugtests attracted a total of 31 vendors (full list below), with 120 participants on site, plus support from remote labs. Observers from nine organizations based in France, the UK and the USA witnessed the execution of more than 2000 tests, based on a test plan with more than 100 test cases, with a 92 per cent success rate. A full report and the test specification will be made publicly available on the ETSI website in due course. The newly added MCPTT Plugtests test scenarios will go through ETSI Technical Committee TCCE for approval and will become part of ETSI TS 103 564.

Building on the first MCPTT Plugtests in June 2017, this is the first of the series to evaluate public safety Long Term Evolution (LTE) and the interoperability of MCPTT products and services outside Europe, and the first in the world to run tests to evaluate MCDATA and MCVIDEO. The goal is to validate the 3GPP standards, provide a platform for vendors to test their implementation and products, and ultimately achieve a single, interoperable, global standard.

“This event shows how productive the relatively small critical communications industry can be when it collaborates and works together towards a common goal,” said Harald Ludwig, Chair of TCCA’s Technical Forum. “It is essential that exhaustive tests are conducted to ensure the end user can completely rely on their equipment in a crisis situation.”

The 2018 MCPTT Plugtests were hosted by the Texas A&M Internet2 Technology Evaluation Center (ITEC) at the Disaster City in College Station, Texas. The event was organized by ETSI, and supported by TCCA, the representative body for the global critical communications community, by the National Institute for Standards and Testing (NIST) Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR), the Public Safety Technology Alliance (PSTA) and the European Commission. FirstNet also took a great interest in the second MCPTT Plugtests.

Saurav Arora, ETSI MCPTT Plugtests manager, said “During this second MCPTT Plugtests the vendors could test their 3GPP Rel-14 implementations including MCData and MCVideo with each other. The observations from the testing have been collected and 3GPP related observations will be fed back to the appropriate 3GPP working groups for correction or clarification of the 3GPP specifications.”

Planning for the next MCX Plugtests (the “X” stands for PTT, VIDEO and DATA) is under way – details will be posted on the ETSI and TCCA websites in due course.

About ETSI PlugtestsTM events
The first ETSI PlugtestsTM event took place in 1999. Since then they have proved a valuable tool in the development of global standards. Plugtests events serve two main purposes: they provide essential feedback to our technical committees to help ETSI improve standards and to accelerate the standards-making process, and they enable engineers to get together to test the interoperability of their implementations – which can reduce a product’s time-to-market.
The benefits of such events include improving the interoperability of products and services, supporting the deployment of new technologies, enabling networking between partners, competitors and other experts, and validating ETSI standards. Plugtests are organized by the ETSI Centre for Testing and Interoperability (CTI).

About ETSI
ETSI provides members with an open and inclusive environment to support the timely development, ratification and testing of globally applicable standards for ICT-enabled systems, applications and services across all sectors of industry and society. We are a not-for-profit body with more than 800 member organizations worldwide, drawn from 66 countries and five continents. Members comprise a diversified pool of large and small private companies, research entities, academia, government and public organizations. ETSI is one of only three bodies officially recognized by the EU as a European Standards Organization (ESO). For more information please visit: www.etsi.org and follow us @ETSI_Standards

Contact
Claire Boyer
+33 (0)6 87 60 84 40
claire.boyer@etsi.org

About TCCA
TCCA represents all standard mobile critical communications technologies and complementary applications. Our Members are drawn from end users, operators and industry across the globe. We believe in and promote the principle of open and competitive markets worldwide through the use of open standards and harmonised spectrum. We maintain and enhance the TETRA Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) standard, and drive the development of common global mobile standards for critical broadband. TCCA is a 3GPP Market Representation Partner and a member of the Mission Critical Open Platform (MCOP) project. Our Members actively contribute in 3GPP working groups. To find out more, please visit www.tcca.info and follow us @TCCAcritcomms

Contact
editor@tcca.info
+ 44 77 66 33 32 77

Full list of participants:

Tested Equipment: MCPTT Application Servers (17 vendors):

Airbus, Alea, Cisco, Ericsson, Genaker, Frequentis (participating AS integrated in Control Room), Harris Corporation, Huawei, Hytera, Kapsch CarrierCom, Leonardo, Motorola Solutions, Nemergent, Nokia, StreamWIDE, TASSTA, TD Tech.

MCVIDEO Application Servers (7 vendors):

Alea, Ericsson, Genaker, Harris Corporation, Hytera, Nemergent, StreamWIDE.

MCDATA Application Servers (10 vendors):

Airbus, Alea, Ericsson, Genaker, Harris Corporation, Hytera, Kapsch CarrierCom, Leonardo, Motorola Solutions, Nemergent.

MCPTT Clients (20 vendors):

Airbus, Alea, Armour Communications, Etelm, Funkwerk, Genaker, Harris Corporation, Huawei, Hytera, Kapsch CarrierCom, Leonardo, Mission Critical Open Platform (MCOP), Nemergent, Nokia, Prescom, Softil, Sonim, TASSTA, TD Tech, Valid8.

MCVIDEO Clients (8 vendors):

Alea, Funkwerk, Genaker, Harris Corporation, Hytera, Nemergent, Nokia, Softil.

MCDATA Clients (8 vendors):

Airbus, Alea, Etelm, Genaker, Harris Corporation, Hytera, Leonardo, Softil.

Evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services (eMBMS) Components (5 vendors):

Athonet, Expway, ENENSYS Technologies, Huawei, one2many.

LTE network components (3 vendors):

Athonet, Ericsson, Expway.

User Equipment (6 vendors):

Airbus, Bittium, Funkwerk, Huawei, Sonim, TD Tech.

IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) (1 vendor):

Athonet

Audio Quality Tester (1 vendor):

Spirent

Observers (7 organizations):

AT&T, Department of Homeland Security, French Ministry of Interior, TCCA, Southern Linc Wireless, UK Home Office, Verizon Wireless.