Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Alternatives Answering The Call- With CDPD networks set to shutter, emergency services agencies are now looking for mobile data alternatives

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2004 13:03:35 -0500

Alternatives Answering The Call
With CDPD networks set to shutter, emergency services agencies are now looking
for mobile data alternatives. And they aren't always limited to mainstream
cellular schemes.
BY KAREN BROWN
FEBRUARY 1, 2004

Police and fire agencies looking to bring their mobile data systems into the
21st century are finding there is more than one way to answer that call.

With the CDPD systems run by Verizon Wireless and AT&T Wireless set for
retirement in the next two years, police and fire agencies are eyeing their
mobile data options. But while the cellular carriers are offering transition
plans to their next-generation networks, some agencies are looking beyond the
cellular world, opting for proprietary or Wi-Fi broadband networks either as a
supplement or a replacement.

One such example is the city of Aurora, Colo., which is adding a Wi-Fi hot spot
system on top of its existing CDPD service provided by AT&T Wireless.

The city has Wi-Fi hot spots set up at three fuel depots and three police
district stations–places officers must go at least once during their shifts. In
this hybrid scheme, laptops in police squad cars can automatically switch
between the two networks using a network roaming component provided by NetMotion
Inc.

DRIVING SPEED The major driver for Aurora is a need for speed, according to Eric
Hermelee, vice president of marketing for Wavelink Corp., which is supplying the
system's management and provisioning software.

"From a business standpoint, public safety is on a leading edge of intermingling
the use of Wi-Fi with wide-area coverage–that being CDPD or cellular networks,"
Hermelee says. "And the reason they are doing that is that through the use of
Wi-Fi, they get a very fast pipe out to the field, and that high bandwidth also
comes at a very economical price."

That bigger pipe is an advantage more as a maintenance tool rather than for
database access, according to Mike Bedwell, Aurora' s manager public safety
systems. Given an average speed of 16 kbps over CDPD networks and 60 kbps
offered by GPRS networks, frequent system software updates and security patches
can take more than an hour.

"When you are looking at a major file that you need to download, that is
completely impractical," Bedwell says. "In the world of public safety, these
guys aren't sitting in fuel depots or hot spots long enough to send them a meg
or two megabit files."
Still, for now, Aurora is beginning to transition from CDPD to AT&T's GPRS
network. Bedwell notes that while an upgrade to AT&T's even speedier EDGE
network is possible, "it still doesn't give you the megabit range that a Wi-Fi
network does," Bedwell says. "We like those six-digit numbers."

THE MESH OPTION Other jurisdictions are taking things a step further, entirely
replacing the CDPD systems with newer, high-bandwidth technology. That is the
case in Garland, Texas, which recently started transitioning from CDPD to its
own network, using a proprietary broadband mesh network technology from NexGen
City.

"It's essentially gone from just a mobile data connection point to a complete
converged network, giving them the opportunity to have data as well as video,
and in the future voice," says Richard Dwelle, NexGen City's president.

Although it uses the same 2.4 GHz unlicensed spectrum as Wi-Fi, the NexGen
City's NextNet product is proprietary, setting up a mesh network with multiple
access points and routers that can deliver 1.5 Mbps in throughput. The user
laptops also serve as routers, as with a peer-to-peer network.

Project contractor Lockheed Martin space operations division is now building the
network, which is about 30 percent complete. When complete some time in the
second quarter, the network will have upwards of 360 to 400 points covering 57
square miles–the largest mesh network of its kind built to date, Dwelle says.

This is the first network NexGen City has deployed, and thus far the 2-year-old
company has put all of its resources into the project. But now it is starting to
talk to other cities in suburban Dallas-Fort Worth.

TECHNOLOGY AGNOSTIC That emergency service agencies are opting for a wide range
of network technologies does create a market opportunity. Enter Info-Cop, which
offers a software-based system that allows information exchange.
The fact Info-Cop is seeing good business these days points to the myriad
systems agencies are now tapping, according to Charlie Wall, vice president of
sales and marketing. "It allows any kind of department to use any kind of
wireless technology they want to use," Wall says.

Despite all of this competition from alternative wireless systems, AT&T Wireless
is still pushing forward with its plans to move emergency services customers
over to its GSM/GPRS or EDGE networks before it shutters its CDPD network in
June.
As for Wi-Fi entering the picture, AT&T Wireless views it as a complementary
rather than competitive technology to its cellular-based emergency services
systems.

"We believe that with EDGE, for example, we are reaching speeds where we could
see some commonality between the two–we would like to see very quickly a PCMCIA
card that hot-swaps between the two," says Stacey Black, vice president of
government data solutions at AT&T Wireless. "I think that is going to be the
next big thing."
Whatever the case, it appears emergency services data systems are not converging
on a single technology. So be on the lookout for plenty of variations down the
road.

http://www.wirelessweek.com/article/CA378489?spacedesc=Departments&stt=000

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