Harris announces LTE testing success, mobile VPN offering
LAS VEGAS — Harris will demonstrate its Next Connect mobile VPN offering and announce that its LTE solution completed the first phase of national public-safety testing during this week’s IWCE.
By partnering with NetMotion — provider of the popular Mobility XE mobile VPN offering — Harris developed the Next Connect product to address the session-persistence demands of public-safety users, such as those that will be roaming between various wireless broadband networks, including the proposed 700 MHz private public-safety LTE system, said Chuck Shaughnessy, vice president of Harris Public Safety and Professional Communications.
“We have been working with NetMotion together to come up with a better version of what they do, if you want to classify that way, and we call that Next Connect,” Shaughnessy said. “What Next Connect does is manage over-the-air connections between various 3G providers, Wi-Fi and switches.
“What our version of it does is that it changes the algorithm they use to select the wireless link, so we’ll use what we call look-ahead technology to predict when you are about to go out of coverage and move to a better option before you actually lose [the wireless signal] … It adds probably 15-20 seconds improvement in switching times between links and gives you a little bit better viability as you move between today’s 3G, Wi-Fi and LTE networks.”
Shaughnessy emphasized that NetMotion “has a great product, and we love it,” but Harris wanted to work the mobile VPN vendor to develop a solution that is “a little bit more robust” for public-safety use in the next generation of broadband data.
Signal strength and bit/error rates are the primary factors considered in the anticipatory algorithm use in the current version of Next Connect, which is available immediately, Shaughnessy said. Future versions of the solution may include the ability to make network decisions based on available data-throughput rates and by application, he said.
In addition, Harris today announced that its LTE solution successfully completed Phase 1 of the Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) program, demonstrating that its solution — featuring Nokia Siemens LTE base stations — meets the functionality testing required to be part of the nationwide LTE network for public safety.
“All of the documentation is finalized,” Shaughnessy said. “They’ll be doing the second phase probably toward the end of March, and there’s Phase 3 further down the road.”
