L3Harris Announces Broad Support for MCPTT Across its Portfolio of Converged Devices

According to Todd Perdieu, support for a standard such as MCPTT is critical for the future of first-responder communications.

L3Harris announced that 15 of its XL series LMR-LTE radios will support the mission-critical-push-to-talk (MCPTT) standard, giving the company, according to a company official, the industry's largest portfolio of MCPTT-capable devices.

Todd Perdieu, director of partners, products, and strategy at L3Harris, noted that support for a standard such as MCPTT is critical for the future of first-responder communications.

It's been nearly two years since AT&T announced FirstNet PTT, the US first MCPTT offering. Verizon has announced MCPTT services from Ericsson and Motorola Solutions in the months since. Later that year, AT&T announced a second Motorola Solutions MCPTT product and confirmed that Samsung developed FirstNet PTT.

“L3Harris is continuing our commitment to being all in on mission-critical convergence,” Perdieu said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “I’ve always said that P25 is to narrowband as MCPTT is to broadband … MCPTT starts to give mission-critical users and first responder the possibility of using broadband as their primary voice service. Historically, this has never been done.

Although these product development milestones have not yet resulted in large-scale MCPTT deployments, Perdieu believes that will change soon, based on the adoption of BeOn, the L3Harris software platform that includes a variety of applications, including a proprietary over-the-top push-to-talk (PTT) offering.