MuniWireless

Southlake, a suburb of Dallas, Texas, is also using Wi-Fi for video surveillance in its downtown area. They are using equipment from Bridgwave Communications; the systems integrator is Redmoon, a wireless ISP based in Plano, Texas. Wireless video surveillance is one of the most sought-after applications among cities. However, as many UK cities have discovered, it’s not enough to put up cameras. You need people to monitor the images and do something about them to make it effective in fighting…

Arriva, a train operator in Scandinavia, is offering free Wi-Fi service to passengers traveling across Denmark, starting with the trains that run between Aarhus, Thisted and Tønder in Jutland. Arriva carries more than 7 million passengers each year.

The backhaul for Arriva’s Wi-Fi service is 3G HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) from 3 (www.3.dk) (which is 60% owned by Hutchinson, a Hongkong based telecommunications company). Because almost all of Denmark has HSPA coverage, the Arriva trains will not use satellite as…

Wi-Fi on public transport is hot these days. The high-speed TGV service between Paris and Brussels will be launching Wi-Fi service on May 14 for trains traveling between those cities, expanding the service later to trains going all the way to Amsterdam.

On the other side of the world, Malaysian luxury bus operator, Odyssey Prestige Coaches, is adding free Wi-Fi service to the buses that run between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore (350 kilometers, 4 hours). The buses are equipped with wide…

Last week I interviewed Lt. Tony Crawford of the Dallas Police Department to get a better picture of how the they are using wireless cameras installed in various parts of the central business district (CBD) to tackle crime. I wanted to know more about this project after reading a newspaper article on how the cameras captured a robbery at a Dallas bus station and allowed the police to arrest the suspect within a short period of time.

Among the questions I…

The city of Grande Prairie (pop. 50,000) in Alberta, Canada has just completed a feasibility study and is expected to issue a Request for Proposals (RFP) by the end of April 2008 for the deployment of a wireless network that will cover most of the city. The city wants the network to support a variety of municipal applications such as emergency response, transit and automated vehicle monitoring systems, public safety, and wireless cameras. It may include public Internet access for…