Officials provide more specifics about mission-critical push-to-talk (MCPTT) standard for LTE, FirstNet deployment

Work on LTE Release 14 already has started, and that release is scheduled to support items such as mission-critical video and mission-critical data. Those new features are expected to leverage much of the core-services functionality established for mission-critical voice, Thiessen said.

“We’re still working on these requirements, but the good news is that we’re going to be able to leverage all of the stuff we did on Release 13 for push to talk in the creation of the standard for video,” Thiessen said.

“That means we’ll get all of the group configuration, identity management and everything else, with the intent being that we didn’t want public safety to have to learn to do group management for push to talk different than they do for video. We wanted that to have the same underlying capabilities, so that you learn once and then you know how to do it for all of the services that you want to use.”

In addition, officials are hopeful that LTE Release 14 will include functionality that will let agencies link their LMR and LTE networks, so they can leverage the best aspects of both types of networks, Thiessen said.

LTE Release 14 is scheduled to be completed next March, according to 3GPP.