Aug 8, 2008 12:50 PM, By Donny Jackson

KANSAS CITY—Push-to-talk interoperability between most cell phones, PDAs and LMR radios is now available to public-safety agencies and other enterprises with access to broadband networks, as shown during a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) demonstration yesterday.

In its the radio over wireless broadband (ROW-B) project, DHS has developed a solution that leverages the cellular push-to-talk capabilities of Clarity Communications—a subsidiary of ISCO International—and the recently created bridging systems interface (BSI) protocol to enable widespread push-to-talk capability via broadband wireless networks, as well as enhanced situational awareness through location and presence functionality.

Luke Klein-Berndt, chief technology officer for the DHS Office for Interoperability and Compatibility (OIC), said the ROW-B project is not designed to replace LMR radio.

“Our aim is … to find ways to complement it and augment it,” Klein-Berndt said. “There may be a bus driver that you may want to be able to talk to during an incident, but you don’t want to have to give him a $5000 radio.”

Clarity’s software-based cellular push-to-talk technology enables any handheld device using the Windows Mobile or BREW operating systems and operating on a wireless network that supports IP packet data—for instance, a CDMA EV-DO or WCDMA network, but not an EDGE network—to act as a push-to-talk device with a call-setup time of less than 800 milliseconds with quality-of-service assurances, said Dan Esposito, systems engineer for Clarity Communications.

Communications from such devices are sent to a Clarity server, which was located in Illinois for the purposes of the demonstration. The server transmits its communications to a BSI-capable gateway, which are available from several vendors, said Emil Olbrich, senior systems engineering consultant for Protiro and consultant on the ROW-B project.

In this demonstration, the BSI gateway used was the Raytheon JPS ACU-2000, which now ships with BSI capability, said Roman Kaluta, director of interoperability solutions for Raytheon JPS. Kaluta also noted that his company’s popular ACU-1000 product can be upgraded to an ACU-2000 with the addition of a couple of modules.

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