The Democratic National Convention got underway today in the city of Charlotte NC. Cellular providers Verizon and AT&T enhanced their wireless service around the city, Charlotte Convention Center, and the Time Warner Cable Arena.
American Tower deployed an In-Building Distributed Antenna System (IDAS) network in a major Charlotte hotel and 45 Outdoor DAS nodes upon existing street lights and structures, along with 20 Wi-Fi access points to support the increased communication and data needs of the more than 35,000 delegates, visitors and members of the media.
AT&T calls its mobile distributed antenna system a DOW – DAS on Wheels. The Democratic National Convention is the DOW’s “debut”.
“It was literally a concept on the back of a napkin in April,” says Paula Doublin of AT&T’s antenna solutions and DAS group. Since then it’s come through full tech specs and been built and deployed. “It’s fully self-contained .. complete with an RF source,” says Doublin. It is transported on a 22-foot container truck similar to those used by movers.
According to Cisco, all the e-mails, tweets, streaming video and mobile Internet usage at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, will generate one terabyte of data.
The City of Charlotte signed a contract with Alcatel-Lucent to deploy one of the first public-safety networks using LTE in the dedicated public-safety 700 MHz broadband spectrum.
The project would enable 24 new wireless towers to complement six existing towers on the network, and bring over 11,000 public safety users onto the system. The city expected to complete deployment by July 2013.
But a federal decision halted work on public-safety LTE projects nationwide. That means that security officials for the Democratic National Convention will not be able to use a dedicated broadband network.
The NTIA — the federal agency overseeing the buildout of the nationwide LTE network and the broadband grants that Charlotte expects to use to pay for its buildout — instructed entities to halt their early LTE deployment, at least until the First Responder Network Authority board is appointed. NTIA’s position on spending $380 million in stimulus grant funding changed “dramatically” when Congress enacted legislation that reallocated the 700 MHz D Block to public safety and provided $7 billion in funding for a nationwide public-safety network.
The Convention’s security requirements prompted the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) to choose uReveal to provide cutting-edge security to meet their analytical needs.
uReveal will be used to monitor, scan , and be alerted to almost anything that poses a danger to the event or city across disparate documents and data. uReveal says it can monitor and analyze news websites, social media and other web resources in harmony with internally generated crime and intelligence data without the traditional database processes.
Mashable has 5 Facebook Apps That Are Shaking Up Politics.
