The Global Certification Forum (GCF) and TCCA are pleased to announce increasing industry support for the GCF Certification program for Broadband Mission Critical Services with ASTRID from Belgium, and Erillisverkot from Finland joining GCF as Mission Critical Communication Operators.

ASTRID is the operator of the national radio communications, paging and dispatching network designed for emergency and security services in Belgium, and Erillisverkot is Finland’s state-owned organization responsible for providing mission critical services, software services for situational awareness and services securing critical infrastructure and communication.

These operators join Myndigheten för Samhällsskydd och Beredskap (MSB) from Sweden, the first public safety organization to become a member of the GCF as a Mission Critical Communications Operator (MCCO). Other European organizations are on the process of joining the initiative.

On the Test Equipment side, Keysight Technologies announced being first in the market to validate at GCF 3GPP EUTRA Mission Critical Test Cases, using ETSI MCX EUTRA TTCN.

These achievements facilitate conformance testing being adopted to guarantee standards compliance and ensure high reliability, performance and interworking mandated by mission-critical communications.

All these organizations participate in the Mission Critical Services Work Stream, set up by GCF and TCCA to align and speed up the market availability of certified 3GPP standards-based Mission Critical (also referred as Broadband Mission Critical), Services and Devices.

The GCF certification programme assures device-network and client-server compliance to 3GPP standards for mission critical devices and services, as well as contributing to reducing testing cost and accelerating time-to-market.

"The GCF-TCCA collaboration, establishing 3GPP Mission Critical Services certification, is a crucial program that will bring significant benefits to industry manufacturers, network operators and increased confidence to frontline end users. We are pleased to see longstanding TCCA government operator members such as MSB and now ASTRID, and Erillisverkot becoming the first GCF Mission Critical Communications Operators supporting the program,” said TCCA CEO Kevin Graham.

“We look forward to other network operators following their lead and more MCX manufacturers committing to the program to ensure we build robust 3GPP MCX compliant and interoperable ecosystem. The commitment to also establish MCX server to server certification and develop MCX Interoperability Testing Frameworks will ultimately result in Conformance and Interoperability testing covered in GCF MCX Product Certification."

Lars Nielsen, GCF’s CEO, said: “We are pleased to welcome new Mission Critical Communications Operators joining the Global Certification Forum, and the active collaboration of Keysight to validate a new test solution for conformance testing, facilitating the path towards interoperable, 3GPP standards-based mission critical services and devices.”

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