MuniWireless

What are the Top 50 Trends in Municipal Wireless? We’re counting them down at our MuniWireless 2007: Silicon Valley conference in Santa Clara. Here are items 40-31 on the list. What are the Top 50 Trends in Municipal Wireless? We’re counting them down at our MuniWireless 2007: Silicon Valley conference in Santa Clara. Here are items 40-31 on the list.

50-41. Read that portion of the list here.

40. Park and Pay: Janis Jefferson Benton, deputy IT director for the City of Houston, described how the municipality is rolling out a 1.9 square mile wireless parking meter solution that includes secure credit card authorizations using encryption for security. $300,000 delivered 750 parking meter deployment. The network delivered a positive ROI in six months.

39. Five Million Dollar Penalty: EarthLink paid the City of Houston a $5 million penalty for failing to build the city’s municipal broadband network. And yes, the check cleared. Roughly $3.5 million of that penalty will be set aside for digital inclusion initiatives, according to Benton.

38. Thirty Wireless Initiatives: Looking ahead, City of Houston’s departments are exploring roughly 30 different wireless efforts. “We’re treating wireless now like any other bread and butter IT initiative,” says Benton.

(Update: For more on Houston’s evolving municipal broadband strategy, see Carol Ellison’s post on the topic.)

37. Mobile Emergency Rooms: The City of Tucson, Arizona, which has 227 square miles, deployed an “emergency room link” between ambulance paramedics and Tucson’s University Medical Center, according to Francisco Leyva, a project manager for the city. Sixteen ambulances have the video system. The video link can support up to 20 hospitals ‚Äö?Ñ?¨ plenty of scalability, considering there are only 11 hospitals in the area.

36. Stop On Red: City of Tucson is rolling out mesh radios at every traffic signal. Longer term, the city is testing the network for the police department, transportation field workers, building inspectors and pan-tilt-zoom video surveillance, Leyva added.

35. Small City, Big Vision: The City of Granbury, Texas (6,800 residents) is running the following municipal wireless applications: Internet access, police department records management, video archive, incident reports, firehouse records management, WISER Hazmat (hazardous materials) information management, CRM (customer relationship management), inspection software, ERP (enterprise resource planning), video surveillance and terminal services, according to Tony Tull, director of IT.

34. Employee Perks: Any city employee in Granbury, Texas, can access the municipal broadband network for free, according to Tull.

33. The New Weather Channel: Emergency workers in Granbury were able to use the municipal network to check weather forecasts during unprecedented storms and flooding in the area.

32. Small But Critical Mass: Granbury’s network has about 100 monthly fee customers; 3-6 tourist customers per week; 35 city employees using the system from home; 12 police department vehicles; six pieces of fire department apparatus; three EMS vehicles; and health, building, historic and fire inspector users, among others.

31. Insider’s Look: Hotels gain free Internet access in Granbury if they agree to tie their video surveillance systems in with the city’s public safety systems.

30-21. Read the list here.

Related posts:

1. McAllen, Texas installs wireless video surveillance network
2. Reading, Pennsylvania implements citywide wireless video surveillance
3. Granbury, Texas to deploy wireless video surveillance