What we test at the ETSI MCX Plugtests

Mission-critical push-to-talk is a standard, which is the whole point of it. A police force, a railway or a utility that buys to 3GPP is buying the freedom to use more than one supplier, and that freedom is only real if the implementations actually meet.

The ETSI MCX Plugtests are where that is checked. TASSTA has taken part since 2017.

The 10th event, May 2026

18 to 22 May 2026. Participants ran 356 test cases. ETSI reported 92 percent interoperability across the event, with more than 240 people taking part. Those figures are the event’s own aggregate, published by ETSI, and they describe the ecosystem rather than any one participant.

What we take into the room

The areas we have tested, from our own plugtest documentation:

Registration and authorization. A user signing in to the service and being granted what they are entitled to;
Affiliation. Joining and leaving talk groups, and what the system does when a user is affiliated to several at once.
Floor control, basic and advanced. Who speaks, who waits, and who overrides: priorities, queueing, timers, revoking the floor when a timer expires, and multiple simultaneous talkers.
Emergency alert handling, including alerts carried over MCData;
Location. Position reporting and the triggers that cause it;
MCData. Short data and messaging between implementations;
Functional alias. Addressing a role rather than a person, which is how control rooms actually work;
Security. The key management and protection mechanisms the standard requires;
OAM. Operation, administration and maintenance;
Interworking. The bridge to land mobile radio.

What a result at a plugtest means

It means the cases were run against other people’s implementations, under rules everybody signed up to, and that what failed was found rather than discovered by a customer.

It does not mean certification, because plugtests do not certify. It does not mean a score for TASSTA, because per-vendor results are confidential by agreement and we hold to that, for our results and for everybody else’s. And it does not mean every feature of a product has been exercised, only the cases in the catalogue for that event.

We think that is worth saying on our own website, because the alternative is a market where everybody claims the same thing and nobody can check any of it.

Why it matters when you buy

Multi-vendor is the point. If your control room, your clients and your core can come from different suppliers, you keep the ability to change your mind in five years;
Failures found early are cheap. An interoperability problem found in a test week costs a week. The same problem found during a migration costs the migration;
It is checkable. ETSI publishes a report for each event. You do not have to take our word for the parts that are public.

Our plugtest documentation lists every area we have taken into the MCX test events, case by case. It is written for the engineer who has to evaluate us. Tell us who you are and what you are evaluating, and we send it.

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