Mission critical broadband achieves crucial milestone

Discussing the importance of the announcement, a spokesperson said: “MCS and critical communications provide essential voice and data connectivity to first responders, public safety services, transportation sectors, and more. The next generation of MCS - also referred as broadband MCS - are being delivered over LTE cellular networks and evolving towards 5G.”

The spokesperson continued: “With this new certification, MCS operators and service providers can be sure of the quality and compliance of devices and services. This will facilitate the development of an ecosystem of MC services with multiple interoperable providers.

“Beyond this initial announcement, the certification scope for mission critical services will continue evolving to support additional releases - such as 3GPP Release 15 -, and standards-based services such as MCData and MCVideo.”

GCF CEO Lars Nielsen said: “This new MCS certification follows a multi-year collaboration between GCF and TCCA, and the members of both organisations at the Mission Critical Services Workstream. For the first time, MCS product vendors can demonstrate conformance of different MCS clients and servers, based on global standards maintained by 3GPP.”

TCCA CEO Kevin Graham said: “Following several years of work from members of TCCA and GCF, we now have an agreement, at industry level, on how to prove compliance of mission critical services to the market - based on standards, with the highest quality requirements.”

According to GCF and TCCA, the MCS certification is open to device manufacturers and MCS client vendors who are already active in GCF, or are joining the organisation.