MuniWireless

From time to time, vendors tell us of activities on the private side of the wireless world that offer insights on the many things the technology can achieve. One of the most interesting of these recent epistles came from Motorola which headed the consortium of companies that built the mesh network for the Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro. Games over, the companies are giving the infrastructure to the city to continue running valuable public safety applications.We are muniwireless.com (emphasis: muni) but vendors tend to keep us apprised of most of their many activities–public and private–and we occasionally like to highlight those that either have implications for munis or offer insights into what the technologies can do.

Perhaps the most heart-warning of these epistles this summer came from Motorola which worked with a consortium of companies in deploying its MOTOmesh network for the Pan American Games, held last month in Rio de Janeiro. Games over, the companies are giving the infrastructure and applications that were used to the city.

This is a marvelous gift to Rio‚Äö?Ñ?Æa ready-made muni network that, according to a Motorola news release, “allowed for a computer-aided dispatch of emergency calls‚Äö?Ѭ?The police also had access to an intelligence system that analyzed data coming from the different sites throughout the city designed to detect illegal activity. The police vehicles, already equipped with computers supporting satellite location systems, were able to receive information such as vehicle records and drivers licenses, all while in motion and without the use of voice radios.”

As PennState’s Prof. Jack Carroll noted in an opinion piece we highlighted earlier today, mobility opens all sorts of possibilities for new applications.

Applications being run on two other private networks that recently came to our attention demonstrate the efficiencies that mobile applications also achieve. These stories come from private companies but, until case studies on muni apps start rolling in, they are useful in gaining a vision of what happens when wireless apps are put to work.

Ray Cammack Shows (RCS), for instance, put a Firetide mesh to work to support its mobile carnival midway shows. A press release from Firetide tells how the group can quickly set up and break down its mesh to support a “digital midway” that provides eTicketing, inventory management, and time card tracking for its more than 500 employees.

In a very different setting, the Falkirk Mining Company, a subsidiary of North American Coal Corp., a large U.S. coal producer, deployed a Strix mesh to carry critical logistics data communications to moving coal trucks and bulldozers across a 25 square mile surface mine in North Dakota . According to a Strix press release, “coal trucks are linked to an innovative GPS system which uses 802.11 to relay logistics information to the central office network, which tracks vehicle locations, active and planned mining areas, and time sensitive operations data.”