ETSI reports 92% interoperability success rate from MCPTT, MCDATA, MCVIDEO plugtests

One notable vendor not listed among the ETSI event participants is Samsung, which has played a leading role in the public-safety LTE effort in South Korea and is the winner of the handset contract for the ESN in the UK. In the U.S., Samsung has several FirstNet-certified handsets and has been rumored to be a leading candidate in AT&T’s effort to provide FirstNet users and other enterprises with an alternative MCPTT solution to the one being developed by Motorola Solutions.

ETSI will continue to conduct these LTE-related plugtests, but the name will change, according to Arora. With the inclusion of MCDATA and MCVIDEO, future events will be dubbed MCX Plugtests instead of MCPTT Plugtests.

In addition, ETSI plans to conduct a limited interoperability event in December and January on a virtual basis, with vendors participating from remote locations, Arora said. That will be followed by an in-person event in June 2019 at a site that still needs to be determined, he said.

“We would prefer to go to Asia for this testing. I cannot confirm the venue yet, but we will try to do it in Asia—maybe Korea or China,” Arora said.

ETSI hopes to expand its testing next June, Arora said. Each of the last two ETSI events have focused only on interoperability between LTE vendors, but next year’s event is expected to include tests of interoperability with LMR systems, he said.

“We will try to include the most important topic—based on the feedback we’ve received—which is the interworking [MCPTT] with TETRA and P25,” Arora said. “That will be one of our targets for our face-to-face plugtest.”

Arora said that ETSI would like to initiate testing of off-network functionality, such as LTE proximity services (Pro Se) for device-to-device communications and isolated E-UTRAN operation (IOPS), which supported localized LTE functionality when there is no connection to the LTE core.

“If we have the support from vendors, we would write some [device-to-device] test cases June plugtest, and we would include these features,” Arora said. “It all depends on the availability from vendors.”

ETSI hopes to release a more detailed report about the results of last week’s testing by the end of July, Arora said.