MCPTT certification launched

On 11 June 2024, the Global Certification Forum (GCF) announced the launch of certification for MCPTT (Mission Critical Push-To-Talk) products. This launch is an important milestone in the work GCF and TCCA (The Critical Communications Association) initiated in 2020 with the establishment of a joint taskforce which later became the Mission Critical Services (MCS) Work Stream for GCF.

MCPTT is a voice service which is standardised by 3GPP to support the critical communications industry. It will be used in several sectors, such as public safety, railways, utilities and others. MCPTT and the other mission-critical services — MCVideo and MCData — are designed as an application which runs over a 4G/LTE or 5G broadband network.

The launch of the certification is a very important milestone. Now, for the first time, vendors can prove that their implementations and products are really compliant to the 3GPP mission-critical standards. We know from TCCA’s work with TETRA that such certification provides network operators and end users with confidence of standards’ compliance of the technology, and enables a true multi-vendor market which encourages further innovation as well as more product availability, quality and competition.

TCCA set up the TETRA interoperability testing and certification 25 years ago and continues to observe such success and outcomes. For broadband products TCCA partnered with the GCF to establish a certification program to address in a similar way the more complex broadband ecosystem device and client conformance demanded by users and operators.

The workstream is supported by members of both GCF and TCCA and has worked over the last years to establish the processes and an ecosystem for mission-critical product certification. This has resulted in the establishment of a validated test platform from Rohde & Schwarz; the RTO (Recognised Test Organisation) known as AstaZero; and Ericsson acting as the ACE (Assessment Capable Entity) for 3GPP-mission critical products. It is expected that more test platforms, RTOs and ACEs for mission-critical products will be available in the future.

Just a day after the launch of the certification, the first product was certified. Frequentis has certified its MissionX Android SDK. Now that the certification program is established, it is expected that many other products will be submitted to confirm their conformance to 3GPP MCX standards.

The certification is important for purchasers of mission-critical products like operators or users. With a certified product, they can be sure that their solutions will be compliant to the 3GPP standards and thus later will also work together with implementations of other vendors. Purchasers are encouraged now to include certification as a requirement into their procurement specifications. TCCA’s Legal & Regulatory Working Group (LRWG) is establishing with GCF input sample texts which can be considered for inclusion in procurement specifications — an initial sample text is available upon request via TCCA.

TCCA will continue supporting the ETSI MCX and FRMCS (Future Rail Mobile Communications System) Plugtests. The Plugtests, while not intended to provide any formal certification, are an opportunity for vendors to test their implementations with each other and uncover any areas for improvement in the 3GPP standards. The fourth FRMCS Plugtests are being held from 1–5 July 2024, and the ninth MCX Plugtests event is planned for early 2025.

The next steps will be to extend the GCF certification to include MCVideo and MCData services and later 3GPP Releases. The current certification covers MCPTT Release 14. Later releases are backwards compatible, allowing products which have implemented a later release to be submitted for certification now.

The GCF MCS workstream is continuing to work on other topics. For example, field tests are tests on live networks and, as soon as mission-critical networks declare themselves as Field Test Qualified, the field tests can be launched. In the next phase the workstream will look into including interoperability and performance tests for mission-critical products.

So far certification is available for the mission-critical device and the mission-critical client on the device. Work has already started at ETSI (the European Telecommunications Standards Institute) to write conformance test cases for the server side, which will cover the server side of the mission-critical services as well as the server-to-server interface and the interworking interface (IWF) to other technologies like TETRA, P25 or GSM-R. These test cases will be brought to 3GPP and GCF for consideration in conformance testing and certification processes.

“Global certification of 3GPP MCX devices is crucial in this region at a time when private mission-critical LTE and 5G deployments are on the increase, the Public Safety Network rollout in New Zealand continues and the Public Safety Mobile Broadband program in Australia is in planning,” said Alan Seery, Chair of TCCA’s regional chapter, the Australasian Critical Communications Forum (ACCF).

“Certification brings many benefits to suppliers, network operators and end users, and greater certainty that implementations will deliver capability in a unified fashion, minimise project risk and underpin future network evolution as 3GPP MCX standards are enhanced.”

On 9 July, GCF and TCCA are running a webinar designed to guide prospective MCX suppliers on how to undertake GCF MCX certification for their product — details and registration are available here.

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