MuniWireless 101: Applications: Public Safety

Without a doubt, the largest and most successful sector within the municipal wireless market is public safety. Police, fire and emergency services departments are increasingly taking advantage of wireless networks for a wide range of activities, ranging from routine administrative tasks like remotely filing accident reports to more complex – and dangerous – activities such as identifying gunshot locations and assessing the best ways to enter burning buildings.

In the 2007 State of the Market Report research, 75 percent of municipalities with active or planned wireless networks were either already running or planning to implement public safety applications – up from 65 percent just one year earlier. Even cities that do not yet have comprehensive municipal wireless networks in place – such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago – already are using wireless networks for a wide variety of public safety applications. This not only has made public safety the market’s largest application, but the fastest-growing one. The reasons are simple and compelling:

1. Wide network usage creates high utilization rates. There are literally dozens of different public safety functions that already are being run on wireless networks, with dozens more planned for the near future. Networks that can run administrative, crime-fighting, physical security, health care and voice communications simultaneously are very cost-effective on a price-per-user basis.
2. Public safety networks are politically popular with local constituencies. Residents and local businesses have always placed a high priority on public safety for obvious reasons, and increasingly have voiced support for initiatives that provide police, fire and emergency services departments with better tools to make their communities safer.
3. Wireless networks for public safety are generating positive return on investment (ROI). Public safety departments have been reporting positive ROI from their applications in as little as six months in some cases – generated by savings in overtime costs, eliminating costly cell phone and leased line contracts, and increased revenue from citations.
4. Public safety applications for wireless networks are gaining widespread, positive publicity. When the tragic bridge collapse took place in the 2007 outside of Minneapolis, wireless networks helped first responders locate and rescue survivors. Video surveillance applications in New Orleans helped police departments defuse potentially life-threatening criminal acts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and in rural Oregon, citizens living in close proximity to a chemical gas-processing depot have air quality monitored and reported on a 24/7 basis over a countywide wireless network.
5. More than in any other application, there is a large amount of grant money available. The most visible external funding sources are federal government programs from the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But there also are literally hundreds of third-party funds available from other federal and state agencies, as well as from private foundations dedicated to funding technology initiatives for public safety. And there may be no better friend for public safety organizations to cultivate than local representatives, who often are able to tap into federal “earmark” funds for a wide variety of uses.

In more and more instances, cities and counties are launching their municipal wireless programs with public safety for the reasons cited above. This initial application not only serves as a proving ground for the technology, but new applications often can be deployed on top of the same hardware infrastructure used for the public safety networks for little or no extra cost. That’s what the city of Providence, R.I., is doing: They started with the city police force as the first user of their network, and have recently moved to extend the network to the fire department. And, that will be followed by such applications as meter reading and building inspection.