Alcatel-Lucent first to make live LTE calls at PSCR

Alcatel-Lucent this week announced it is the first company to have its LTE equipment go live at the emergency communications demonstration network being managed by the Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) program.

“We went live with a fully operational network at NIST; we finished the first call,” Morgan Wright, vice president of Alcatel-Lucent’s global public-safety segment, said during an interview. “Every piece of equipment that you would use for public safety is in the NIST lab … We have all of our [network] stuff down there.”

Located in Boulder, Colo., the demonstration network was created by the PSCR — a partnership of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Law Enforcement Standards Office and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) — to foster interoperability.

"The demonstration network developed by the joint NIST-NTIA Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) program is an important part of the strategy for a nationwide interoperable public-safety broadband network in 700 MHz,” Dereck Orr, public-safety communications program manager for NIST/OLES, said in a prepared statement. “Here in the Boulder area, we will provide a common field environment for manufacturers, carriers, and public safety agencies to test and evaluate advanced broadband communications equipment and software tailored specifically to the needs of emergency first responders.”

Earlier this month, Alcatel-Lucent conducted the first field demonstration of an LTE network operating on the 700 MHz public-safety broadband spectrum in Alexandria, Va. Video from that demonstration can be viewed on YouTube.