Cities have gone wireless for Safety and Surveillance, observes NPR. Cities are mapping out vast wireless zones to create safety nets, says National Public Radio’s Joshua Brockman. Public internet access has nothing to do with it.
- Oklahoma City rolled out a municipal network covering 555-square-miles last month. It links hundreds of video surveillance cameras across the city enable police officers and firefighters to view real-time images of locations throughout the city. The $5 million network was paid for with sales taxes and improvement funds. Mark Meier, IT director of Oklahoma City, says the project first formed six years ago to upgrade the public safety system.
- A 232-square-mile Chicago wireless network, built with Firetide gear, has several hundred cameras installed in its central business district, using $35 million in funding from a grant from the Department of Homeland Security.
- Chicago has also installed the largest network of bus surveillance in the U.S., with cameras on its entire fleet of more than 2,100 buses. On July 21, Chicago’s Bus Tracker will have a new look, based on Google mapping features. Customers can choose which routes to view on the map and get details about estimated arrivals by hovering the mouse over buses or bus stops.
- New York City’s Wireless Network, one of the largest of its kind in the world, is known as Nycwin. It was built by Northrop Grumman (pdf) for exclusive use by first responders and should be completed by summer’s end. It cost $500 million
- Dallas is deploying wireless video surveillance networks in specific areas.
EzWireless designed and built a mobile, secure, broadband and web-based network covering 700 square miles in Eastern Oregon five years ago. It enabled local fire & police departments in seven cities, parts of three counties and two states. It’s still the largest WiFi system in the United States.
ABI predicts this global market alone will grow from $16 billion today to $45 billion eight years from now.
Skeptics point out that England studied 14 CCTV systems across the UK in 2005 and concluded that “most systems revealed little overall effect on crime levels” (pdf). An analysis by the ACLU concluded that “video surveillance systems in the U.S. show little to no positive impact on crime.”
Clearwire completed the first phase of Mobile WiMAX testing, involving 15 square miles in Washington County just west of Portland, in April, 2007. Then it focused on a beta network covering 145 square miles, most of Washington County.
When Clearwire’s Mobile WiMAX service in Portland launches later this year, it should cover some 700 square miles, incorporating 3-4 adjoining counties (above).
It didn’t cost taxpayers one dime.
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Clearwire CTO John Saw says backhaul of WiMAX networks require 30-60 Mbps per site with blanket coverage of the entire 700 sq mile Portland region requiring WiMAX nodes installed on some 80 cell sites. Nortel is supplying VoIP infrastructure and services for Clearwire using their Application Server 5200 to deliver SIP applications.
I don’t get it. Why spend good money on WiFi security networks. It’s not very secure. It interferes with public WiFi (and visa-versa). It’s expensive and unreliable.
WiMAX and 4.9GHz would be cheaper, faster and more secure. Cellular data connections (or Mobile WiMAX) linking to a wireless modem work nearly anywhere. In a car, on a boat, on a train, in a plane.
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