Duo raise the bar in next-gen mission critical communications

The solution raises the bar significantly in next-gen MCC and unveiled and demonstrated throughout the Mobile World Congress 2018 event and at IWCE in Orlando on Softil's booth 2577.

"Legacy mission critical technologies today have limited data capabilities resulting in public protection and disaster relief teams as well as critical national infrastructures lacking key services such as presence, video calling, video streaming, data sharing location services all integrated into a single device," said Pierre Hagendorf, CEO Softil.

He added: "The unique Softil/Nemergent solution now available to the market represents the definitive building block for next generation mission critical communications in the widest of applications ranging from fire-fighters and police emergency communications to high speed trains and oil rig communications solutions."

Jose Oscar Fajardo, Nemergent's CEO, stressed that governments and enterprises need the most up-to-date mission critical communications for their public protection and disaster relief forces and critical national infrastructures.

"Such networks allow instant group communications with a high degree of reliability, availability, and security. This is vital because emergency and security systems increasingly provide real time information that involve transmitting significant amounts of data in a reliable and uninterrupted manner," said Fajardo.

In bringing this solution to market, Softil is providing its multi-platform MCPTT compliant BEEHD client framework enabling the development of standards-based mission critical applications and devices over LTE,  LTE-R (Railway), and 5G.

It has all the advanced communication capabilities required for mission critical communications such as Push-To-Talk, Push-To-Video, Data Sharing, Group Communication, Presence, and more.

Softil has many years of experience in carrier grade MC communications enabling technologies, and its technologies have been the backbone of many deployments for VoLTE and ViLTE. One example is its BEEHD Software Development Kit (SDK) being used by Hoimyung Corporation to build next-gen 3GPP MCPTT standard compliant mission-critical push-to-talk communication terminals for use in South Korea's new hi-speed railway link now in service at the Winter Olympic Games 2018.

Nemergent contribution to the new solution covers the server side. Over the years, the firm has specialised in the development and experimentation of a new wave of mission critical technologies, as specified by the 3GPP since its Release 13.

Nemergent provides all the server components required for the deployment of new MCPTT services with a future proof design capable of supporting the addition of new enhanced services such as MCVideo and MCData. Nemergent's MCPTT Application Server implements the standard interfaces for managing the prioritisation and multicasting features offered by LTE and 5G networks.

Nemergent's servers are optimised for agile and scalable deployments, supporting the novel network virtualisation functions available in modern mobile broadband networks.

Last year, Softil and Nemergent have actively and successfully participated in the first ETSI MCPTT PlugTest interoperability testing event for next generation MCC. The two firms will be attending the 2^nd MCPTT PlugTest event in June 2018, where 3GPP Release 14 features, such as Mission Critical Video (MCVideo) and Mission Critical Data (MCData) will be tested alongside the majority of 3GPP MCPTT Release 13 functionality.