Shortly after Charlie Hewitt joined the city of Providence, R.I. in 2003 as its chief information officer, he learned he was facing a critical technology decision for the city’s public safety forces. AT&T Wireless ‚Äö?Ñ?¨ formerly Cingular ‚Äö?Ñ?¨ had announced it was shutting down its Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) service, which meant Providence needed to shop for a new technology to keep sending data to its police and fire vehicles
This article originally appeared in the June 2007 issue of MuniWireless Magazine.
By Mike Perkowski
In Providence, RI, a proprietary mesh network keeps police officers in the field.
Shortly after Charlie Hewitt joined the city of Providence, R.I. in 2003 as its chief information officer, he learned he was facing a critical technology decision for the city’s public safety forces. AT&T Wireless ‚Äö?Ñ?¨ formerly Cingular ‚Äö?Ñ?¨ had announced it was shutting down its Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) service, which meant Providence needed to shop for a new technology to keep sending data to its police and fire vehicles.
Although CDPD provided only limited functionality for public safety ‚Äö?Ñ?¨ largely because of its very slow speed ‚Äö?Ñ?¨ it was the only solution the city had. And a transition plan for new wireless data capabilities had yet to be established.
“When I first came to work here, it was one of the first things the public safety IT folks threw it me,” Hewitt says.
Hewitt considered the city’s options, including going with a cellular solution from Verizon. But he dismissed that quickly because of the cost of Verizon’s new EVDO service and the city’s desire to securely wall off the public safety network from the public.
Then, one day Hewitt received a phone call from a sales rep from a small, Florida-based company called Mesh Networks. “He started talking to me about their mesh solution, and I knew a little bit about what he was talking about from my previous life in IT in the defense industry,” says Hewitt.
Although not in a hurry at that time, Hewitt knew Providence had to come up to speed on alternatives. “I was intrigued by the technology,” Hewett says. “But I told him that I was not about to bet the public safety’s communications network on a tiny company near Orlando.”
Fast forward six months: Mesh Networks is acquired by giant Motorola Inc., gaining both a home for its technology and a deep-pocketed corporate parent with both the resources and credibility to be taken seriously by municipalities.
So Hewitt accelerated the city’s wireless plans and started evaluating his options. And he moved quickly. Today, Providence has a citywide public safety wireless network in place, covering a wide variety of police and fire applications such as dispatching, mobile reporting, license/plate checks, traffic monitoring and administrative functions.
Of course, that’s the short version of the story.
The long version involves more than a year of planning, researching, negotiating and some good old-fashioned New England political-coalition-building to gain financial support for the network in the face of competing projects. It also includes what has evolved into an unusual, perhaps even contrarian, approach to opening up the city’s wireless network for public access ‚Äö?Ñ?¨ or, in Providence’s case, not opening the network for public access.
Paying for the Network
Hewitt did more research about the technology’s capabilities and the potential cost to outfit a citywide mesh solution, and he talked to city officials about their needs. In March 2005, Providence published a Request For Proposal (RFP) document. After receiving its responses, Hewitt and public safety officials visited several existing installations, including the police department in Buffalo, Minn.
Of course, the big issue was how to pay for the network.
Providence had an idea what it would cost ‚Äö?Ñ?¨ about $2.3 million ‚Äö?Ñ?¨ and knew it could utilize funds from the city’s capital operating bonds for at least a portion of that amount. But it also knew that there were several sources of grant monies for public safety networks, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program. That’s when Hewitt realized that he was not alone in wanting access to the grant money, and would need some allies.
As Hewitt and others laid out their proposals to go for the grant money, Hewitt gained two important backers: Leo Messier, director of Providence’s Emergency Management Agency, and Joe McGarry, deputy director for communications at the city’s Public Safety Division.
“The strongest support I got on this project was from our Emergency Management Agency,” notes Hewitt. “(Messier) was on board very fast for this project, and he could appreciate its value because he was a former state cop. There were a lot of other public safety projects that were being evaluated for the grant money, and he took it upon himself to recommend to the mayor that our project should be the one to include in the grant application. The mayor agreed it was a sensible use of DHS grant money, and that’s how it happened.”
Eventually, Hewitt’s project received $800,000 in federal grant money, supplemented by $1.5 million in city funds. “We did some more due diligence, going to Buffalo, Minn., to see the mesh network that Mesh Networks/Motorola built out there with Scientel.” Scientel Wireless LLC is a Lombard, Ill.-based wireless solutions provider that also became involved in the Providence deployment.
“We were quite impressed with what we saw,” Hewett says. “So, we took a deep breath and gave the contract for the business to Motorola.”
Over the next year, the network was built utilizing 50 access points, 460 wireless routers and more than 200 mesh-enabled devices such as laptops and tablets. Motorola Canopy point-to-point solutions were used for backhaul where line of sight back to the master antenna was available, supplemented by Cox Business Systems’ value-added network.
Public Safety Applications
McGarry, of the city’s Public Safety Division, says once the decision was made to build the network, the city wanted to move quickly. “Our dispatch system was antiquated, and it wasn’t doing enough to help fire and police,” McGarry says. “Back then, with the old cellular network, our people had to come back to the station, perhaps wait in the queue for a system to become available, sit at the computer and do their paperwork.
“This new mobile system was going to allow us to have an integrated computer-aided dispatch and records-management capability, and the mesh network really fit the criteria,” he adds. “Compared to what we had, it provided huge bandwidth, which meant that police officers now could get information almost immediately.”
For instance, if an Amber alert was issued, officers could receive a picture of a person or the actual car on the screen in their police cars, pulled up from an automobile database. “Or, if there was an incident at a bank,” McGarry says, “the cop could pull up a video clip from the bank and put that out over the network.”
McGarry says another key driver in the city’s decision was the public safety department’s implementation of the popular Aegis public safety software suite from software developer New World Systems. “The officers had been using the software at their desktops,” McGarry says, “and now there was a mobile module that could let them receive mug shots, send pictures of perps out to the cars and capture photos at crime scenes.”
As with all municipal public safety networks, a critical goal is keeping public safety personnel in the field, rather than in an office doing paperwork. “Our public safety strategy is all about breaking down walls between public safety officials and residents,” says Providence mayor David Cicilline. “This technology is tailor-made for our approach. By giving our officers mobile access to computing power and software tools that were formerly only available at the public safety complex, they’re never chained to a desk.”
Now, the police force is looking at what it calls a “shot spotter system,” essentially a series of acoustical devices scattered throughout the city to monitor gunshots and send a signal to the mesh network providing information on the gunshot’s location. In addition, the city expects to soon go live with video surveillance and eventually add non-public safety functions such as building inspection, permitting and public works.
Not For Public Access
Instead of WiFi, Providence’s solution employs Motorola’s Mesh Enabled Architecture (MEA), a proprietary approach. “At first, I was a little nervous about (using a proprietary architecture), but the more I thought about it, the more I thought it would actually be better not to go with an 802.11 standard network design, a very open standard,” says Hewitt. “This network operates on a 2.4 GHz frequency, the same as 802.11. You’d think there would be all kinds of interference problems, but whatever is going on inside the network to sort out what’s noise and what’s signal, it does it very well, including in areas that are quite noisy like Starbucks. We have not had any instances with interference to cause us trouble.”
Another interesting twist in Providence’s strategy was its decision to eschew the route most other municipalities have taken by opening the network for public access by residents, visitors and businesses. “Right now, it’s a closed, secure network, and that will always be its primary function,” says Mayor Cicilline. “That said, there is extra bandwidth that we think can be available for other city officials ‚Äö?Ñ?¨ like building inspectors and public works crews ‚Äö?Ñ?¨ that can make their work more efficient.”
Hewitt thinks the current network will never be open to public access, another reason he was comfortable going with a proprietary architecture. “I don’t want people going down to Staples to buy equipment to interface with it,” he says.
In fact, in a recent blog post on Muniwireless.com, Hewitt wrote that there’s been no political backlash over the city’s decision to not open the network for public access. He also said the city has learned that operating a network is a big challenge even if it’s just for a small number of demanding users, let alone thousands of constituents.
“The impact on city operations grabs no headlines, but is truly impressive nevertheless,” he wrote.
So Far, So Good
So far, Hewitt, McGarry and others say the network has been a big hit with public safety personnel. “Every time I talk to guys in the station they tell me the network is great, because they can do so much of their work out in their cars,” says Hewitt. “Some of that is really mundane stuff, like supervisors doing performance reviews.”
To date, Providence hasn’t generated any quantitative return-on-investment data, because it feels the simple reality of keeping public safety personnel in the field longer and dispatching them faster is itself a compelling justification, according to Hewitt. “We said we were going to be able to keep our cops out in the field and not have to bring them back to their desks, and we can see that’s happening.”
In fact, Hewitt cites another non-financial but clear justification that the network has caught on with the public safety forces. “With the old network, if a cop dropped his laptop and broke it, you might not see that laptop come in for repair until three or four weeks had passed,” says Hewitt. “Now, when a cop breaks his laptop, he says he needs it fixed immediately or he wants you to give him a spare, because he says he really needs it now.”
No comments yet.