Georgia State Patrol Picks Southern Linc LTE System for Mission Critical Voice Communications

Georgia State Patrol is using a mission-critical-push-to-talk (MCPTT) service from Southern Linc for its primary voice communications, supplanting the state-owned VHF system during the past 18 months, according to an official with the agency.

Captain Brian Screws, chief information officer for the Georgia State Patrol, said the statewide public-safety agency has been using the Southern Linc MCPTT—an Ericsson client operating on L3Harris XL-series devices—for its primary voice communications after using the service as a backup to the state’s LMR network, he said.

“For years, we’ve had a relationship with Southern Linc and utilized their LTE network as a backup,” Screws said Tuesday during a session conducted in the presentation theater on the APCO 2024 exhibit-hall floor in Orlando. “Whenever our VHF platform went down, all of our storm people—and in our dispatch centers—had radios or phones on Southern Linc’s network, and that was our backup.

“But after several years—whether it was snowstorms in north Georgia, the hurricanes that hit the coast of Georgia, or the tornadoes in southwest Georgia—we had case study after case study of real-life scenarios where our state-owned assets always left us stranded. We always knew that, in those times, we prepped our people by saying, ‘Have your Southern Linc out, because when our system goes down—and when those incidents happened, our state assets were going down—have your Southern Linc, because we’re going to rely on that.’

“We started realizing that, more and more, we are having to rely on Southern Linc’s LTE network, because it is more reliable than our VHF network.”

Making the situation more comfortable for Georgia State Patrol personnel is the fact that the agency is using L3Harris XL-series devices—P25 radios that also support 3GPP-standard public-safety LTE communications—according to Screws.

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