Wireless can make cities safe – Rogers

Director of the largest provider of Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), Alvarion, Mr. Rick Rogers, has declared that WiMAX solution could add to making the cities safe.

Rogers who spoke recently, noted that large-scale metro area networks have become increasingly important tool in providing public services and ensuring public safety and security.

He also said that with over 250 commercial deployments around the globe, Alvarion is committed to growing the WiMAX market.

The company, he said, offers solutions for a wide range of frequency bands supporting a variety of business cases, citing an instance with its Open WiMAX strategy, superior Internet Protocol (IP) and Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple
Access (OFDMA) know-how, and proven ability to deploy end-to-end turnkey WiMAX projects, “Alvarion is shaping the new wireless broadband experience.”

He explained that OFDMA is a multi-user version of the popular Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing.

The Director, Alvarion also noted that responsible government agencies and municipalities around the world are leveraging the power of broadband connectivity to embrace the safe city approach, with centralised emergency response and management in the face of threats, attack, crime or industrial-scale accidents.

“Simply put, effective communications is the cornerstone of effective municipal management and crucial in saving lives and mitigating damage,” he declared.

According to him, safe city projects are municipal-level network deployments whose specific goal is to enhance civilian safety.

Once this network is deployed, Rogers said, the municipality could enjoy the added value of utilising it to drive economic development, increase educational excellence, attract business investment, provide municipal services and ultimately improve quality of life for residents.

Rogers equally explained that wireless broadband networks are an ideal solution for safe city projects as they could complement existing wired infrastructure, or even be used as the core access infrastructure for a safe city.

“Wireless networking technologies are more scalable and flexible, overcoming the limitations of wired broadband in large areas,” he said, stressing that the same muni-wireless networks that are ideal for safe city deployments offer compelling revenue-generating opportunities, such as traffic control, transportation security, automatic meter reading, e-services for citizens to name a few.

Mr. Rogers pointed out that deploying safe city-related wireless applications requires reliable network infrastructure with high capacity and low latency to ensure quality of video, data and voice applications, that existing wired networks, in many cases, are not designed to serve safe city bandwidth-savvy applications, multiple new connections of wide-scale deployment or deliver reliable mobility.

“The necessary applications to deploy a safe city approach include public safety alarm and alert systems, video surveillance, intelligent traffic control, transportation security and access,” he said.

Other applications that could enhance the quality of service a municipality provides, he said includes automatic meter reading, municipal access, mobile management of the city workforce, e-services and residential access.

Making a safe city work means spinning a delicate and vast web of independently mandated departments, from law enforcement agencies and first responder units to firefighters, Emergency Medical Services (EMS), hospitals, government agencies and civilian interfaces – with an even vaster array of devices, needs and security considerations.

Wireless technologies such as WiMAX address many of the requirements for safe city network deployments and applications because they can be deployed quickly and are very flexible.

He further explained that once a base station is operational, services could be provided in a coverage area of up to several dozen kilometers.

“Services are provided using Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) and all that is required is a power source. Peripheral equipment, such as video cameras, sensors, and computers are connected to CPEs and the data between them is easily transferred.

Wireless technologies make deployment changes and expansion very easy, such as installing new CPEs or changing CPE locations,” Rogers said.


ICTREALMS Online ... delivering news for ICT4D