Officials for AT&T, Nokia outline capabilities of upcoming MCPTT-compliant solutions
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Officials for AT&T, Nokia outline capabilities of upcoming MCPTT-compliant solutions
AT&T officials have stated that they plan to begin offering MCPTT services to FirstNet customers by the end of the year. AT&T plans to provide FirstNet subscribers with a choice of MCPTT offerings and other components in the system, Glubochansky said.
“The goal is to create an ecosystem of applications, devices, network components and services … that can develop over time and innovate,” he said.
Glubochansky also noted that the MCPTT standard is designed to enable interoperable communications between MCPTT-compliant solutions from different vendors. Today, users of different PoC platforms cannot communicate via their push-to-talk applications without leveraging some sort of gateway technology.
Currently, AT&T provides PoC services that uses Motorola Solutions’ Kodiak solutions. Motorola Solutions has announced its intention to develop an MCPTT-compliant solution that leverages the best aspects of the company’s Kodiak and WAVE 7000 platforms.
Although Nokia has tested its MCPTT solution with AT&T, the companies have not announced any plans to offer the Nokia product to AT&T customers to date.
Nokia is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of LTE equipment—including eNodeB and EPC components—servicing AT&T and many other global carriers. Tyagi said that this background “absolutely” has helped Nokia develop its MCPTT solution that is able to leverage network functionality.
“When you say integrated or embedded, then you need to have the 3GPP-related component knowledge in your house,” Tyagi said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications after the webinar. “You need to have a lab environment. You have to have specs guy, and they are very expensive.
“Nokia can afford it, because this is our legacy business—access network, core network, wireless—so we have that expertise. All we needed to do is develop this application.”
By combining its networking and applications expertise, the Nokia MCPTT solution is designed to be highly reliable, according to Tyagi.
“This is a mission-critical network that we’re talking about, so we have to make sure there is no single point of failure in the network,” Tyagi said during the webinar. “We have, in the deployment plan, multiple locations for the servers that we can connect seamlessly. If one server fails, the other will automatically take over.”