The 2nd FRMCS Plugtests event, organized remotely by ETSI with the support of the European Commission, EFTA, TCCA and UIC from 16 to 20 May 2022, has concluded with a success rate of 95% of the executed tests.

ETSI Plugtests events are essential to ensure seamless access to mission critical services across different vendors’ products and implementations. The MCX ETSI Plugtests series is the first independent testing of public safety and other mission critical LTE services. The MCX services are the basis for the Future Rail Mobile Communications System (FRMCS), and tests are based on the MCX (collectively for MCPTT, MCVideo and MCData services) framework.

Based on 3GPP Release-17, 338 tests were executed between the different vendors in 60 test sessions, to validate 3GPP mission critical services vendor interoperability. The MCX Plugtests test specification has been amended with additional rail specific test scenarios and will be included in a future version of ETSI TS 103 564.

Additionally, five observations were gathered during the Plugtests event preparation and testing. They provide essential feedback to 3GPP Working Groups as work continues on mission critical communication specifications.

The next MCX#7 Plugtests event is planned for 07 to 11 November 2022 at the University of Malaga in Spain.

Read the full report.