GCF Announces Certification of Broadband Mission Critical Services

The Global Certification Forum (GCF) is adding 3GPP-based Mission Critical Services (MCS) to its certification programme, also referred to as MCX.

MCS and critical communications provide essential voice and data connectivity to first responders, public safety services, transportation sectors, and more. The next generation of MCS, also referred as Broadband MCS, are being delivered over LTE cellular networks and evolving towards 5G, thus providing the services required for emergency response.

Lars Nielsen, CEO at GCF, said: “This new MCS certification follows a multi-year collaboration between GCF and TCCA, and the members of both organisations at Mission Critical Services Work Stream. For the first time, MCS product vendors can demonstrate conformance of different MCS clients and servers based on global standards maintained by 3GPP.”

Kevin Graham, CEO at TCCA, said: “Following several years of work from members of TCCA and GCF, we now have an agreement, at industry level, on how to prove compliance of mission critical services to the market – based on standards, with the highest quality requirements.”

With this new certification, MCS operators and service providers can be sure of the quality and compliance of devices and services. This will facilitate the development of an ecosystem of MC services with multiple interoperable providers.

The MCS certification is open to device manufacturers and MCS client vendors who are already active in GCF or are joining the organization. The certification was subject to activation of WI-288 (Mission Critical Push-to-Talk) in a new GCF-CC version (Conformance Criteria), after the GCF Conformance Agreement Group meeting on June 4, 2024.

Beyond this initial announcement, the certification scope for mission critical services will continue evolving to support additional releases (such as 3GPP Rel.15) and standards-based services such as MCData and MCVideo.