SOPHIA ANTIPOLIS, France -- The first ETSI Mission Critical Push to Talk (MCPTT) Plugtests event – interoperability test sessions for mission-critical LTE equipment – concluded on Friday, 23 June 2017, with 140 participants from 19 vendors. The event was held at the ETSI headquarters in Sophia Antipolis, France, in partnership with the TCCA, the representative body for the global critical communications community. The test sessions were observed by seven government and public safety network operator organizations from Belgium, Finland, France, Norway and the UK.

More than 1000 tests were conducted, with a success rate of 85%. The tests are based on 3GPP, ETSI and IETF standards. For this first session, a test specification has been developed for the 3GPP Release 13 MCPTT, comprising 47 test cases.

As commercial products are developed, the TCCA will implement the vendor certification process for mission-critical products and applications, including MCPTT. “Our key goal is to have one global standard for MCPTT,” said Phil Kidner, CEO of the TCCA.

The participating companies and tested equipment are as follows:

• MCPTT Application Servers from Airbus, Alea, Genaker, Harris Corporation, Hytera, Nemergent, TASSTA and ZTE

• MCPTT Clients from Airbus, Alea, Armour Communications, Etelm (included in TETRA Base Station), Frequentis (included in Control Room), Funkwerk, Genaker, Harris Corporation, Hytera, Nemergent, Spirent, TASSTA and ZTE

• User Equipment (UE) from Bittium and Funkwerk

• LTE network components Evolved Packet Core (EPC), Evolved Node B (eNB) and Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) from Athonet, Ericsson, Expway, Huawei and one2many

• IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) from Athonet

The final tests of the MCPTT Plugtests event included pre-arranged and chat mode Group Calls, which involved several MCPTT clients, a Control Room, a LTE cab radio and a TETRA radio.

European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI)