Mutualink, partners to demonstrate interoperable capabilities, New Jersey LTE solutions during APCO

Mutualink Chairman and CEO Mark Hatten said the company developed the tactical node from a previously existing product that has been altered to address the needs of future FirstNet users—a request that is becoming increasingly frequent in the market.

 “This tactical node came about as a specific design for this New Jersey FirstNet opportunity, but it came from a product that we had been selling called the Go Kit,” Hatten said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “It’s very much the functionality of PTT voice, radio interop and video share from our Go Kit.

“We sell a fair amount of Go Kits every month, and the recent request has been, ‘Can we add a Band 14 modem into the Go kit?’ It looks a little different, but it basically does what the tactical node does. So, in the last bunch of Go kits that we’ve sold, every single one of them has added a Band 14 router. To me, that says, ‘I need to solve problems today, but I need to solve them with solutions that will be viable when Band 14 comes along.’”

With all of Mutualink’s work with state of New Jersey with deployable infrastructure, Boucher said it may be easy for some potential customers to believe that is the only use for the Mutualink interoperable platform. But that is not the case, he said.

“Because we have been very focused on the SOW, the tactical node and the deployable space, what a lot of people don’t realize is that Mutualink capability is actually more heavily deployed in fixed infrastructure,” Boucher said. “We have a very large fixed-infrastructure footprint.

“So, we’re bridging the fixed infrastructure world with the ad-hoc and tactical mobile worlds.”