L3Harris expands the company’s 3GPP standards-based mission-critical-to-X (MCX)—mission-critical push-to-talk (MCPTT), mission-critical data (MCData), and mission-critical video (MCVideo)—portfolio, allowing it to provide an end-to-end MCX offering
By Donny Jackson, Editor
L3Harris last week announced the expansion of the company’s 3GPP standards-based mission-critical-to-X (MCX)—mission-critical push-to-talk (MCPTT), mission-critical data (MCData), and mission-critical video (MCVideo)—portfolio, allowing it to provide an end-to-end MCX offering.
L3Harris’ director of global product management and strategic solutions, James Potter said the MCX portfolio—known as the Two47 MCX Software Platform—is the culmination of years of planning and development by the company.
“We launched an MCPTT client in our XL radios two or three years ago,” Potter said during an interview with Urgent Communications. “We’ve been operating on the Southern Linc network for several years. We also put that on FirstNet late last year.
“Now, we’ve brought the full solution out. We now have the server, as well. So, we have an MCX server, an Android client, an iOS client in our XL radios, as well as a Windows dispatch console—a complete, end-to-end solution, coming from us.”
This end-to-end capability makes the L3Harris MCX offering different from those offered by many other providers in the market, according to Potter.
“We’re excited to have probably the greatest overall solution for MCX,” he said. “There are other providers that have just the server or might have just soft clients, but we’re bringing soft clients, Windows and our XL devices converged.”
In addition, L3Harris brings a legacy of mission-critical LMR experience to the relative young MCX marketplace, Potter said.
“Our goal is to make MCX operate for mission-critical [communications], as mission-critical users are accustomed,” Potter said. “Some say that P25 is a de-facto standard for mission-critical comms. We want that user experience [with MCX] to be as similar as possible and only enhance it with the broadband capabilities that MCX brings.”
L3Harris completed its end-to-end MCX portfolio by acquiring MCX server and soft-client technologies from Ericsson, Potter said. Ericsson is best known in the Uericsson,S for supporting MCPTT services offered by Southern Linc, the wireless-carrier entity that supports the Southern Company utility that boast a sizable service footprint in the southeast US
“As utilities build out private LTE networks, they want to have an LTE, standard-based, push-to-talk and video solution, so MCX is perfect for that,” Potter said. “We’ll be working on several different accounts, in addition to Southern Linc.”
Potter said the company launched its Two47 MCX Solution during last week’s DistribuTECH 2025 event in Dallas, because utilities have shown significant interest in MCX services operating on the utilities’ private LTE networks that they control, as opposed to public carrier LTE systems.
“That is the differentiator—it’s a network that they can trust as mission-critical,” Potter said.
“Many [utilities] are looking at [MCX] to be primary and replace their LMR system as a long-term investment—as a subset of the business model for private LTE, as they look at all of the business applications they can consolidate.”
