Better days ahead

Nov 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Jim Barthold

Cities big and small are once again considering 4.9 GHz for public safety.

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Some of the municipal use is not as advanced as the full-scale rollouts in Minneapolis or Riverside. Pittsburg, Calif., uses Strix Systems gear for video surveillance over the 4.9 GHz spectrum. Starting with five cameras four years ago, things have ballooned to where “we're close to 50 cameras,” said William Zbacnik, a captain in the Pittsburg Police Department and the project's coordinator. “From the start, it never has lost steam and we continue to add to the network itself.”

Pittsburg's decision to go with wireless was easy to make, Zbacnik said. “It was too expensive to lay fiber throughout our city, and wireless seemed to be an ideal route to go,” he said. “We have relatively few hills or mountains or any kind of high-rise buildings to obstruct our signals.”

While Zbacnik is enthused about the wireless surveillance network, he won't mimic the more advanced models of other communities because Pittsburg is in a joint powers agreement (JPA) with Contra Costa County, Calif., which is getting U.S Department of Homeland Security funding for an overarching public-safety network.

“We're following the county's lead. At this point, it would probably be a waste of time for us to build a second system over our camera system,” he said.

However, Zbacnik did not discount the possibility of Contra Costa doing it. “They're completely familiar with our system because they've looked at it several times,” he said.

Everyone in the public-safety space, it seems, is getting more familiar with the benefits of 4.9 GHz broadband wireless while simultaneously becoming less enthralled with the potential for 700 MHz broadband, which likely will not reach most communities for several years, if at all.

“700 MHz solves some problems; it doesn't solve every problem,” said Sandy Bendremer, vice president of Galaxy Internet Services, which runs combined 2.4/4.9 GHz municipal wireless networks. “I think municipalities are too anxious to do something in the short term, and they don't want to wait for 700 MHz to settle out. That's the reason why 4.9 GHz has some renewed interest at this point.”