New York City plans to build a public safety wireless
network of unprecedented scale and scope, including the capacity to
provide tens of thousands of mobile users with the ability to send
and receive data while travelling at speeds of up to
70mph.
Bids from suppliers are due next month, and Gino Menchini,
commissioner of the city's Department of Information Technology
& Telecommunications, said he expected to award contracts for
three-month pilot projects to several bidders by the end of the
year. The final contract is expected to cover five years, with
options for two five-year renewals.
Menchini described the plan as "the most challenging and most
comprehensive" wireless project he is aware of .
"No one has ever attempted this before on such a scale," said
Roger Skidmore, vice-president and chief product officer at
software supplier Wireless Valley Communications.
In fact, some suppliers have asked whether New York would scale
back some of its requirements, such as a mandate to support 2Mbps
data rates and streaming video from thousands of users
simultaneously. But city officials rejected the requests in written
responses. The plan is "demanding and aggressive", Menchini said,
but he believed that its requirements can be met.
Mike Doble, a consultant at the Public Safety Communications
Resource Center in California, estimated that it would cost about
$500m (£273m) to develop the network architecture and install the
wireless network. An executive from a supplier that is involved in
the bidding said the price tag could reach $1bn.
Menchini said the network would provide mobile users from the
New York police and fire departments and the emergency medical
service with broadband access to information such as mug-shot and
fingerprint databases or building floor plans.
Plans call for the wireless network to support up to 5,000 end
users initially and then be expanded. Menchini said he wants
installation to start "as soon as possible".
EDS, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, iXP, Lockheed Martin, Northrop
Grumman and Raytheon all sent representatives to a bidders
conference and are viewed as potential candidates but none would
comment.
Consultants and suppliers said the only way New York can meet
its aggressive throughput and coverage goals is to use a mesh
network architecture. Traditional Wi-Fi hot spots require a wired
backhaul for each wireless access point. In comparison, access
points in mesh networks communicate with one another in a
so-called multihop sequence, allowing wired backhauls to be limited
to the edge of a network or subnetwork.
Skidmore said that, based on his reading of the proposal, a mesh
network design "just jumps out at you" as a logical approach to the
project.
Doble agreed, saying that any other network design would be too
expensive.
Mesh networks are also well suited for solving potential
wireless coverage problems in Manhattan's urban canyons, said Rick
Rotondo, vice-president of technical marketing at MeshNetworks.
"You just deploy a lot of low-cost nodes," he said, noting that
they could be installed on light poles.
Bert Williams, vice-president of marketing at Tropos Networks,
said his company could cover all of Manhattan with 600 Wi-Fi access
points operating in the 2.4Ghz band in a mesh configuration.
Williams added that it would take more access points if the new
4.9Ghz public-safety band was used.
Lucent Technologies is taking a different tack by proposing a
network based on CDMA Evolution-Data Only (EV-DO) technology, which
is used in mobile phone systems and has a peak data rate of
2.4Mbps.
Karen Donahue, Lucent's director of government relations and
strategy, said she sees New York using EV-DO over a private network
in the 1900Mhz cellular band.
Tropos, MeshNetworks and Lucent all said they have teamed up
with systems integrators that are preparing bids, but declined to
identify their partners.
Bob Brewin writes for Computerworld