MCPTT or MCX is what some in the industry believes as the next generation of Professional Mobile Radios (PMR). I personally believe that it's an extension of what PMR radios currently are.
Take for example when our lives were run by Blackberrys and Palm Pilots and before the wave of iPhones and Android devices. We were more than happy to have BBM on our phones and Indonesia alone had 60 million active BBM users for a population of 250 million residents. BBM was breaking traditional boundaries where you are able to message someone across the globe without incurring any international SMS charges. Of course it had limitations and you will not be able to contact someone if they were not using a Blackberry.
Along came the iPhone launch in 2009, where traditional keyboards were replaced by on-screen touch keyboards and suddenly, having a gyroscope in a phone makes sense. Then came the November of 2009 and Whatsapp got launched and allowed users from different devices to communicate just by using data. And along the way, receiving pictures, pdf documents and even excel files and word files became the norm.
Our current digital PMR radios allow us to send/receive a voice message, a short text message and in some large scale systems, GPS and Geofencing. Thats it! On top of that, if you are using different platforms such as DMR or Nexedge, you won't be able to interop between the two systems seamlessly. (notice where i'm going with all this limitations?)
The current PMR radios is exactly how Blackberry, with their BBM, and Nokia, with their brick phones were before the iPhones and Samsungs disrupted the entire industry. People never knew that sending messages between platforms were important and people never knew that video calling was even needed, especially during these current Covid-19 times.
MCPTT and MCX is what has been gaining momentum the past 2 years and making a lot of telecom operators take notice. The MCPTT standard part is to qualm the nagging legacy consultants and engineers of how unreliable a new technology is and so, 3GPP and ETSI (who was also the same committee that standardised Tetra/DMR) came up with standards on how MCPTT and MCX should maintain a certain standard and inter-operability. The MCX part is the "Whatsapp" and "Gyroscope" disruption this industry severely needs. Suddenly, having a Push-To-Video feature makes a lot of sense in order to bring situational awareness to command centres and having a Man-Down feature working with existing gyroscopes on modern PTT equipment, coupled with remote video activation allows safer One-Man-Operation (OMO).
TASSTA MCPTT Solution
FirstNet® Push-to-Talk was an initiative by the American government to use LTE for first responders. It was based on the public safety standards set by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). There are redundancies in place during outages as well as servers across the country to lower latency and faster access. With FirstNet®, first responders are able to have 1-to-1 calling, Presence, so you can see who is online as well as Supervisory override, allowing a selected user to speak at any time.
What FirstNet® has done is actually catapulted the next generation of capabilities to the Mission Critical space. Previously, Mission Critical and LTE has never quite integrated fully from a Mission Critical point of trust. With the FirstNet® platform, government agencies around the world has adopted LTE based Push-to-Talk platforms such as South Korea's PS-LTE network as well as Thailand's Huawei Push-to-Talk solution.
What all this means to the average user?
There's a building in Singapore with 3 towers and about 50 users. To build up their Distributed Antenna System (DAS), it would set them back about S$200,000 to include the repeater system as well as their portable radios. With an MCPTT solution riding on the telco QoS network, this building owner pays a monthly subscription which includes SIM card costs and it'll STILL take them about 10 years to break even as opposed to their initial CAPEX investment for a DAS. Not to mention, the users now are able to receive Job Ticketing functions, Push-to-Video features as well as Man Down features.
On top of that, a lot of building owners in Singapore are now switching to a fully digital and portable Facilities Management System (FMS) as well as Building Management System (BMS). By incorporating your FMS/BMS system as well as your Push-to-Talk system in one device, the entire workflow and communications are all on just ONE device.
Island-wide Walkie Talkie
With Nextel having shut their iDEN network down in June of 2013, it's no surprise that current iDEN operators are scrambling to replace the legacy iDEN network to keep up with the demand. South Korea's operator has also moved to Nokia's MCPTT solution which they jointly developed and several other operators have moved to MCPTT such as TASSTA MCPTT solution to cater to users that will always need the Push-to-Talk solution.
Conclusion
In short, conventional PMR systems will always have a place in the Push-to-Talk space. It's the additional features such as Push-to-Video, that will define what will be the next "Whatsapp" application disruption to legacy PMR systems.