Oregon’s Gov. John Kitzhaber signed an executive order last week to establish a statewide council to plan for the creation of a wireless communication system to support public safety agencies at all levels of government.

“To do their job effectively, these professionals depend on mission-critical information relayed via wireless communication systems,” Kitzhaber said, in a statement. “Interoperable communication systems are the cornerstone of being able to provide a coordinated response to emergencies.”

In Oregon, as in many other states, not all public safety agencies can communicate with each other simultaneously during an emergency.

The Statewide Interoperability Executive Council will direct the planning, designing and implementing guidelines, best practices and standard approaches to address Oregon’s public safety communications issues. The council will also recommend funding strategies that support development of a statewide system.

The Council will be made up of representatives from a wide range of public safety agencies from the state, local governments and the federal government, including: The Oregon State Police; the state’s Office of Emergency Management; the state’s Department of Transportation; Oregon’s Military Department; the Oregon Fire Chiefs Association; the Oregon Association Chiefs of Police; Oregon State Sheriff’s Association; the Oregon Association of Public Safety Communications Officials/ National Emergency Number Association; and other federal, state and local organizations.

The mission of the Oregon Telecommunications Coordinating Council (ORTCC) is to provide all Oregonians with affordable access to broadband to improve the economy, quality of life and reduce the economic gap between rural and urban communities. They have a draft report.

IBM and a partnership of public safety and transportation agencies will build a wireless public safety data communications network for the Washington D.C. region that may be a model for the nation.

The Capital Wireless Integrated Network (CapWIN) is the first interoperable wireless system to span multi-state government jurisdictions. It will enable officials from more than 40 local, state and federal agencies to communicate with each other in real time and provide firefighters, police, transportation officials and other authorized emergency personnel with wireless access to multiple government data sources during critical incidents.

As part of a public/private partnership with the city and county of Denver, Ricochet Networks has given the city modems and service in exchange for the opportunity to jointly develop and deploy municipal and public safety applications based on the wireless network.

The service is now available to consumers and businesses throughout Denver for $44.95 per month — even in neighborhoods where high-speed access is not available via local phone or cable companies.

“We’re proud that Denver is the first city in the nation to re-launch the Ricochet service for consumers,” said Wellington Webb, mayor of Denver, in a statement. “We’ve been testing it since February and we feel it’s a communications tool that holds great potential for the city.”

Webb said Denver will test applications such as high-speed Internet connectivity in police patrol cars to access law enforcement data; mobile capabilities for fire department personnel so site plans can be accessed and viewed en route to a fire; and for paramedics to access health records and emergency room availability while they’re responding to an accident.

Company officials said the mobile network is capable of reaching speeds of 176 kbps and higher.

The Ricochet network had been built in 21 cities and had more than 51,000 subscribers, though the company was shut down last August. RNI acquired the moribund company late last year, and the new owners said they are actively negotiating with municipalities, private landlords and resellers to reactivate the network and sell the service in other U.S. cities following the Denver launch.

After Sept. 11, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden heard first-hand stories from Intel Corp., a major employer in Oregon, about how it offered free manpower and machinery to the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, only to be turned down because Intel employees didn’t have security clearances.

“Why shouldn’t the federal government make it possible for this to happen?” Wyden asked. “When Intel wants to send a significant number of people to make it possible to use their staff in a national crisis, why shouldn’t they?”

Although that experience was the basis for his introduction of the high-tech guard legislation, Wyden also has been busy making sure that all the gizmos and gadgets that such legislation encompasses become “empowering” tools, not an end unto themselves.

“Homeland security starts at home in our hometowns,” said Tom Ridge, White House director of homeland security, as he announced $10.3 million in grants to 43 nonprofit groups and public organizations in 26 states and the District of Columbia.

The American Radio Relay League, based in Connecticut, will receive $181,900 to “train amateur radio operators who would provide emergency communications during emergencies.

Reallocating radio frequencies for public safety systems is slow and complex. Setting up the infrastructure to use it properly costs serious money. Robert Lee of the Public Safety Wireless Network, puts the price of a smooth, secure nationwide emergency communications network at $18 billion.

Michigan alone spent $230 million developing its system over the last seven years. The state’s outlay doesn’t include the $3,000 local subscribers will have to shell out for each piece of handheld or car-mounted radio equipment they’ll need.

The money must come from somewhere. One likely source: the $3.5 billion President Bush has proposed for state and local first responder aid through FEMA.

Oregon has published a request for proposals to build a public safety data warehouse that will combine four systems and give police, policy-makers and others interested in correctional issues a single resource, leading to better and faster decision-making across agencies. Washington State’s $14.3 million, Digital Archive building is set to open its doors in the winter of 2004, and will be located on the Eastern Washington University campus in Cheney. It will have the capacity to hold 800TB-worth of government information.

Oregon 3D has a visualization room driven by SGI and Maya.

M/A Com’s Interop 2002 Tour will be pitching M/A-COM’s solution for public safety communications interoperability with lots of pricey gizmos and gadgets. “Turn It Off” describes why the police chief in Greenwood, Ind., disconnected his dispatch center from the Indiana Project SAFE-T statewide radio system.

In other states, state troopers, fire, police and EMS personel all use wireless PDAs. Oakland Police use Padcom in their cruisers. It creates a virtual single data network, seamlessly switching between disparate CDPD and 802.11b hot spots.

Could a Radio Free Portland utilize a “4G” system like Arraycomm or Flarion? Perhaps “4G” could eliminate interference problems with ajoining Nextel while providing better, faster, cheaper service for everyone. City-run Community LANs could be just the ticket.

The alternative; cities will continue to use taxpayer money to pay tens of millions for cellular CDPD or GSM/CDMA data services (which may be unavailable in serious emergencies) and non-interoperable 800 MHz radios for voice communications (with expensive trans-coding work-arounds).

Bureaucracies may need more diplomacy and cooperation. Cost/effective solutions are here, but they can’t be delivered until seemingly petty turf disputes are settled.

I’m no telecommunications expert but here’s my thinking (again). Sorry if this sounds like a broken record;

1. The state is networked with fiber from BPA and SB-622. Use it.
2. This state-wide network also provides two-way videoconferencing to every high school in the state.
3. Every county gets a Wi-Fi Van ($20K) equipped with a 2-way satellite dish ($6K) and a half dozen PDAs and laptops ($10K). They would link locally to the van “hot spot” ($3K) while the van backbones (via 5.8Ghz and 802.16a standards) to a nearby radio tower ($5K) that’s hooked into the network. The satellite would provide back-up and downstream multi-casting. Put thirty-six of these $50K vans in each county of the state. It would cover lots of contingencies, provide “swarm” coverage, and could be used for education and training.
4. Add a hybrid (180 mpg) e-cycle ($5K) with ten, 12V 5.0Ah batteries (for remote power and relay).

Will that cost $200 million? No, $2 million is closer to it. That leaves $98 million in a $100 million budget.

There’s always some uncertainty if you don’t own the spectrum, but the 5.8-GHz band is less crowded (and legal everywhere in the state). Proxim’s Tsunami also has interference blocking, letting users cut out pieces of spectrum that are causing problems. A 20M bit/sec base station ($5K) can go 8.4 miles and bandwidth can be dedicated upstream and downstream. More than 1,000 subscribers can be assigned to one base station.

For larger installations, six base stations can be sectorized. On the subscriber end, a $1,200, 20 Mbps unit connects to users through an RJ-45 jack. The 5.8 GHz band will adopt the 802.16a (wireless MAN) standard for “wireless DSL”. It will improve QOS and lower cost.

Everyone’s got WiFi. WiFi PDAs and notebooks are standard issue. Wi-Fi is broadband, interoperable, and ubiquitous. The licensed band is not. Let’s use it where appropriate – everywhere.

Here’s a short video that explains interoperability issues.

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Posted by Sam Churchill on Friday, September 20th, 2002 at 2:26 am.