ETSI Mission Critical Plugtests event reports a 92% success rate

Sophia Antipolis, 28 August 2018

The capacities of Mission Critical Push to Talk (MCPTT), Mission Critical Data (MCData) and Mission Critical Video (MCVideo) based on 3GPP release-14 were tested during the week of the second MCPTT Plugtests on 25-29 June 2018 in College Station, Texas.

The second ETSI MCPTT Plugtests attracted a total of 31 vendors, 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.

During April and May 2018, ETSI set up VPN-Tunnels from the vendors’ premises to the ETSI VPN hub. This allowed the vendors to start integration work and pre-testing of MCPTT and conduct pre-tests with each other. ETSI has developed a test specification with 100 test cases. The test specification will be published as an update of ETSI specification ETSI TS 103 564. About 2000 tests were conducted by the vendors. 92% of the tests were successful. Tests that didn’t pass gave the vendors valuable information to improve their implementations. They also help to discover ambiguities in the standards and to clarify and improve the specifications. The observations from the Plugtests event are fed back to the 3GPP working groups. ETSI’s goal is to provide one global standard for Mission Critical services, which can be ensured by interoperability testing at the Plugtests.
If you have not participated in the first or second MCPTT Plugtests events, you are welcome to join the next MCX Plugtests event (X stands for all services that is Push To Talk, video and data), planned for Q4 2018. The third MCX Plugtests will be a full remote event via VPN tunnels provided by ETSI. The face to face fourth MCX Plugtests event is planned for June 2019 and location will be disclosed by end of 2018. So stay tuned!

The public report is available on ETSI portal.