Georgia State Patrol turns to Southern Linc LTE system for mission-critical voice comms

Georgia State Patrol is using a mission-critical-push-to-talk (MCPTT) service from Southern Linc for its primary voice communications, supplanting the state-owned VHF system during the past 18 months, according to an official with the agency.

Captain Brian Screws (pictured above, in center), chief information officer for the Georgia State Patrol, said the statewide public-safety agency has been using the Southern Linc MCPTT—an Ericsson client operating on L3Harris XL-series devices—for its primary voice communications after using the service as a backup to the state’s LMR network, he said.

“For years, we’ve had a relationship with Southern Linc and utilized their LTE network as a backup,” Screws said Tuesday during a session conducted in the presentation theater on the APCO 2024 exhibit-hall floor in Orlando. “Whenever our VHF platform went down, all of our storm people—and in our dispatch centers—had radios or phones on Southern Linc’s network, and that was our backup.

“But after several years—whether it was snowstorms in north Georgia, the hurricanes that hit the coast of Georgia, or the tornadoes in southwest Georgia—we had case study after case study of real-life scenarios where our state-owned assets always left us stranded. We always knew that, in those times, we prepped our people by saying, ‘Have your Southern Linc out, because when our system goes down—and when those incidents happened, our state assets were going down—have your Southern Linc, because we’re going to rely on that.’

“We started realizing that, more and more, we are having to rely on Southern Linc’s LTE network, because it is more reliable than our VHF network.”

Making the situation more comfortable for Georgia State Patrol personnel is the fact that the agency is using L3Harris XL-series devices—P25 radios that also support 3GPP-standard public-safety LTE communications—according to Screws.

“What really made the difference was, once we saw the marriage of both worlds—connect the XL series of radios to combine the worlds of LTE and broadband, along with our P25 systems scattered around the state,” he said. “When we can merge those together, it really gave us a silver bullet.

“With the radios that our troopers carry today and that our dispatchers get the benefit of operating, we have access to a new network that brings a lot of new technology to our agency. But, at a push of a button—and our folks are trained to do this on their own—we can revert back and look just like we did 12 months ago. To have all of that at your fingertip is as close to a silver bullet as we felt like we could get.”

Southern Linc—a wireless carrier focused on serving the communications needs of the Southern Company utility—transitioned its network from iDEN technology to LTE in 2017. But Southern Linc probably became more enticing to agencies like the Georgia State Patrol—a division of the Georgia Department of Public Safety—when the L3Harris bolstered the device ecosystem, according to David Keith (pictured above, on the right), Southern Linc’s marketing and sales director.

Southern Linc probably was not as attractive to public safety “until that L3Harris [XL device] was able to bridge that interoperability gap between LMR and LTE in the device” Keith said. “That was the game-changer.”

Screws agreed.

“With the radios that our troopers carry today and that our dispatchers get the benefit of operating, we have access to a new network that brings a lot of new technology to our agency,” Screws said. “But, at a push of a button—and our folks are trained to do this on their own—we can revert back and look just like we did 12 months ago.

“To have all of that at your fingertip is as close to a silver bullet as we felt like we could get.”

Screws said that MCPTT over the Southern Linc LTE network is the primary method of mission-critical voice communications for the Georgia State Patrol, but the state currently still maintains its legacy VHF system. However, Screws acknowledged that might not be the case several years from now, as the Southern Linc option provides voice communications “at a fraction of the cost” of the LMR network.

“The number-one people asking that question is the Office of Planning and Budget at the [state] Capitol,” Screws said. “They’re asking us, ‘How long do we need to keep funding the maintenance on those old [LMR] towers?’ We have told them that, eventually, we could see that becoming a reasonable item to discuss.

“But just because I’m conservative by nature, I want that conversation to be a couple of years out, so we make sure that we have built this to be as robust and bulletproof as we possibly make it. After we get a couple of years under our built, then I would be willing to have a conversation about decreasing funding for maintenance on the VHF side.”