As part of the order, ESChat will provide servers that will be hosted at the city’s facilities and co-located with the P25 system. The ESChat service uses what the company describes as an advanced over-the-top (OTT) architecture that supports mobile broadband users on all mobile network operators (MNOs) and allows them to communicate across MNOs, without the need for third-party gateway or interface solutions. This allows public safety agencies to select the MNO of their choice, without any impact on cross-agency communications. ESChat claims that its service also supports PTT communications between it and any other mobile broadband PTT product, including 3GPP mission-critical PTT (MCPTT) through the use of standards-based interfaces.
The deployment makes use of the following ESChat standard features: AES-256 encrypted PTT voice, AES-256 encrypted multimedia messaging, and live and historical (bread crumb) location tracking and mapping. ESChat is certified for use with FirstNet on both Android and iOS and benefits from the quality of service (QoS), priority and pre-emption that are available to FirstNet subscribers. It also supports QoS and radio access network (RAN) priority enhancements on the Verizon Wireless and AT&T commercial networks.
