BEEHD technology selected for interworking gateway

First responders currently rely upon Land Mobile Radio (LMR) analogue and digital radios to communicate in the field. Radios offer familiar simplicity and reliability when it comes to emergency communications.

While MCX technologies offer much greater capabilities, enriching traditionally voice push to talk communications with video, message chat and file exchange, the transition from radio communications to MCX communications will not be instantaneous.

As with any new technology, it will require time for first responders to migrate to MCX technologies. Switching to MCX will also require investments by first responder organizations. A transitional bridge between LMR and MCX allows first responders to start using new MCX technologies gradually without abandoning previous investments.

Intellilink Interworking solutions are that bridge and the first in the emerging MCX landscape. They have been developed by the Catalyst and Softil teams under a contract to Catalyst from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) under its Small Business Innovation and Research program.

"Catalyst chose Softil as its technology partner for the DHS program following careful analysis of available MCX-enabling solutions and we concluded that Softil's BEEHD SDK solution was clearly ahead of the competition," said Catalyst's President, Robin Grier. "Our teams have since collaborated closely to develop our IntelliLink Interworking Solution in just a handful of months."

"Enabling interworking communications between First Responders using existing public safety LMR radios and those using mission-critical push-to-talk (MCPTT) compliant devices on the new FirstNet National Public Safety Broadband Network is a win-win for all involved in public safety," added Pierre Hagendorf, Softil's CEO. "The pioneering IntelliLink solution is an accelerator for widespread deployments of 3GPP standards-based MCX networks."

Softil's BEEHD technology is a cross-platform client framework designed for chipset vendors, device manufacturers, system integrators, application developers and service providers to develop IP-based mission-critical voice and video communications over LTE (VoLTE and ViLTE) solutions.

Catalyst's Dispatch Consoles are FirstNet ready and allow dispatchers to control interworking between LMR and LTE/MCPTT talk groups through an intuitive graphical user interface.