Harris set to exhibit mission-critical PTT, video, data over LTE

ORLANDO—Harris Public Safety and Professional Communications (Harris PSPC) will demonstrate its mission-critical-push-to-talk (MCPTT) solution, as well as mission-critical data and mission-critical video capabilities, as part of showcase of LTE-based developments this week at IWCE 2018.

Last year, Harris PSPC was one of the participants in the first-ever MCPTT plugtest—conducted in France—that demonstrated interoperability between MCPTT-compliant solutions from 13 vendors. Harris PSPC this week will showcase the MCPTT solution that it will use in this year’s version of the plugtest, which is scheduled for late June in Texas, according to Lori Thompson, vice president of strategy and business development for Harris PSPC,  

“We’re going to show the mission-critical-push-to-talk progress we’ve been able to make,” Thompson said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “We’ve been working over the last several years with the standards group on 3GPP to help build a new mission-critical-push-to-talk solution.”

Harris PSPC has provided push-to-talk-over cellular (PoC) capability for several years through BeOn, the company’s PoC offering that is designed to emulate the functionality of P25 voice. But the development of a push-to-talk solution that compliant with the MCPTT standard approved in 2016 by 3GPP—the standards body that oversees LTE technology—primarily represents a “built from scratch” effort that will leverage the company’s VIDA core, Thompson said.

“Consider this the evolution of a few things for us,” she said. “First, our core will evolve to 3GPP standards, so that VIDA will do the evolution. And we will now have mission-critical push to talk sit on top of that, as a new offering.

“Now, that’s not done yet, but we’re far enough along—based on the plugtests that we did last June and how we were able to do voice through that plugtest—we’re not only going to showcase the voice, but we’re going to do mission-critical video and data at the event, as well.”

Harris plans to make the MCPTT solution—as well as a migration path for existing BeOn customers to MCPTT—commercially available next year, Thompson said. Commercial availability of the mission-critical data and video products would happen later, as the 3GPP standards for those solutions were approved more recently, she said.

“The video and data standards are just rolling,” Thompson said. “We were pretty close to that, so we’ve got to wait for all of that a little bit, and we’ve still got some development to do.”

In addition, Harris PSPC will demonstrate the ability for a public-safety officer to stream video from a body-worn camera to incident command by leveraging the LTE connectivity in the company’s XL-200P land mobile radio, Thompson said.

IWCE 2018 attendees can view these Harris demonstrations at Booth 1147 on Wednesday and Thursday.