Motorola Solution buying Kodiak to enhance broadband push-to-talk position

Many in the public-safety community have been curious what impact the mission-critical push-to-talk (MCPTT) standard included in Release 13 of LTE—approved last year by the international 3GPP standards body—might have on LMR usage and planning in the United States, particularly where FirstNet is able to deploy a public-safety-grade LTE system to support potential MCPTT offerings.

Motorola Solutions’ WAVE 7000 meets most of the MCPTT functional requirements today, but the company does not expect to have a product that meets the complete MCPTT specifications “in the short-term future,” Spaeth said. However, Motorola Solutions plans to develop a fully compliant MCPTT product eventually, which could include implementing some technology acquired in the Kodiak deal, he said.

“In terms of a lot of capabilities that are called out in the standard, we believe that we have, or will have, a large percentage of those—probably greater than 75% of those capabilities,” Spaeth said. “Does it use the exact protocol that is called out in the standard? No, it does not yet. In the future, it will. We’ll migrate to that.

“That’s why I differentiate between the protocol and the actual capability. We’re continuing to build that out and participate in those [standards] meetings and things like that.”

In the meantime, Motorola Solution will continue to develop PoC solutions designed for public-safety use, Spaeth said.

 “Quite honestly, there’s some tradeoffs that we have to make,” Spaeth said. “In many cases, we’re under contract with customers to deliver functionality, and a lot of those customers aren’t necessarily hung up on the necessity of the protocol and such. So, I think it’s going to be a function of our priorities and the contracts that we win going forward.

“Certainly, going forward, we’re committed to going in that direction. When we get there will be a function of a lot of business-prioritization discussions.”