Inside TornadoX: A 3GPP-Compliant MCX Q&A with Our CTO

Not a demo. Not a deck. Just straight answers about our TornadoX solution, and the standard it’s built to.

Richard Ascough, Mobile Tornado’s CTO, sat down with us for a full Q&A on the technology.

It covers what “3GPP-compliant MCX” actually means beyond the marketing language, how priority access and network pre-emption hold up under pressure, what the technology behind TornadoX being recognised at the 2025 TCCA Awards actually confirms, and what we’d want a reseller to ask before taking our word for any of it.

Who this is for: resellers evaluating whether to bring our 3GPP-compliant MCX platform into a public safety, transport, utilities, or critical infrastructure conversation, and anyone who wants the substance behind “mission-critical” rather than the marketing version of it.

A conversation with Richard Ascough, CTO of Mobile Tornado

For anyone who hasn’t been following the story, what’s the simplest way to explain what TornadoX actually is?

TornadoX is our answer to a question the market’s been asking for a while: what happens when standard PTT over cellular isn’t good enough anymore?

It’s built on 3GPP-compliant MCX (Mission Critical Services) technology, so it’s not PTT with a “mission-critical” label stuck on it. It’s engineered from the ground up to meet the standards that public safety and critical infrastructure organisations actually require.

TornadoCore, our standard platform, still exists and does its job well for the vast majority of use cases. TornadoX is what we built for the customers who can’t afford anything less than guaranteed performance.

What does 3GPP-compliant MCX actually mean for someone evaluating the platform, beyond the marketing language?

It means we’re not just claiming to be reliable, we’re built to a specification that’s independently defined and testable. 3GPP is the same body that sets the standards for LTE and 5G themselves, and their Mission Critical Services framework covers voice, data and video: MCPTT, MCVideo and MCData.

Being 3GPP-compliant MCX means a customer isn’t taking our word for it. They can verify against a published standard, which is a very different conversation to trusting a vendor’s own internal claims.

Two capabilities that come up a lot are priority access and network pre-emption. Can you explain what those mean in practice?

Priority access means mission-critical traffic doesn’t queue behind everything else on the network. During a major incident, when everyone’s phone is trying to use the same cell tower, our users’ communications get prioritised.

Pre-emption goes a step further: if the network is genuinely congested, a critical call can hold its place ahead of a lower-priority one. That’s the moment commercial-grade PTT tends to fail, and it’s exactly the moment 3GPP-compliant MCX is designed to hold up.

TornadoX is built on technology that was recently recognised at the 2025 TCCA Awards. What did that recognition actually confirm?

It’s worth being precise about this one, because it’s not a trophy we’re claiming for ourselves. TornadoX runs on the Frequentis MissionX MCX SDK, and it was that underlying platform, the 3GPP-compliant MCX technology TornadoX is built on, that won “Best MCX Product or Solution of the Year” at the 2025 TCCA Awards.

What that recognition confirms is that the foundation we chose to build TornadoX on was judged, by an independent industry body rather than a marketing panel, to be genuinely best-in-class. That matters more to us than a trophy with our own name on it would, because it’s a third party validating the engineering decision, not our own claim about it.

Interoperability with existing radio infrastructure seems to be a big theme. Why does that matter so much to the customers you’re targeting?

Because almost none of them are starting from zero. A police force, a utility, a transport operator, they’ve usually got existing LMR or TETRA infrastructure that took years and a lot of budget to put in place, and they’re not ripping it out for a new vendor.

Our 3GPP-compliant MCX architecture is built specifically so it can sit inside a multi-vendor environment rather than forcing a customer to choose. That’s a very different sales conversation to “replace everything you already have.”

What should a reseller who’s used to selling standard commercial PoC know before they start selling into this space?

The biggest mindset shift is that this isn’t a feature-upgrade conversation, it’s a procurement conversation. In public safety and critical infrastructure, 3GPP-compliant MCX credentials are often a gate you have to pass through before a customer will even take the meeting, not something you persuade them into wanting.

The upside is that once you’re in that conversation, you’re not competing on price anymore. You’re one of a much smaller number of reseller partners who can actually answer the brief.

How is TornadoX different from other vendors who also describe themselves as “mission-critical”?

Honestly, ask them what standard they’re built to. A lot of platforms use the language without the substance behind it, it’s a UI decision, not an architecture decision.

TornadoX is built on the actual 3GPP-compliant MCX specification, which isn’t something you retrofit with a software update. That’s the test I’d encourage any partner to apply: is this platform passing a standard, or just using the word?

Where do you see this market heading over the next few years?

I think 3GPP-compliant MCX stops being a niche public-safety requirement and starts becoming a baseline expectation across a lot more industries. As more critical operations move onto LTE and 5G, and as regulators and insurers start asking harder questions about resilience, sectors that used to think of themselves as “important” rather than strictly “mission-critical” are going to need this.

The resellers who understand that shift now are going to be ahead of it, not scrambling to catch up in three years.

What would you say to a partner who’s curious about TornadoX but hasn’t had the conversation with us yet?

Ask us the hard questions. Ask what standard we’re built to, ask how priority access actually works, ask us to show you pre-emption happening live rather than describe it in a deck.

We built TornadoX to survive that kind of scrutiny, and honestly, that conversation usually convinces a partner faster than anything else we could say.

Want to see TornadoX for yourself?

Get in touch at sales@mobiletornado.com, or find out more about our 3GPP-compliant MCX platform.