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.