New Age Technologies shows secure communications, video surveillance at APCO
At the New Age Technologies booth at the APCO national conference in Nashville, Tenn., the name Cisco Systems is prominently displayed, reflecting the company’s use of Cisco equipment to implement its engineered designs for secured communications and surveillance.
Tom Thienel, a consulting partner with New Age, said that the company was exhibiting at APCO to demonstrate the concept it developed for mobile connectivity. He said it enables a mobile command vehicle or emergency vehicle to connect to its host organization’s private network or to the Internet via a wireless connection.
The reason New Age’s design is different, Thienel said, is because it incorporates multiple RF technologies, including satellite, 800 MHz, 3G cellular, 802.11 or the 5.8 GHz UNI band, which provides maximum throughput to the network.
“The system is smart enough to make a decision as to what data to send over what link. For instance, you wouldn’t want to send streaming video across a 19.2 kbps 800 MHz link. The system will evaluate the connections available and determine which data should be sent across which media,” Thienel said.
New Age handles the design and assessment in the design phase and, if requested by a client, the implementation phase.
“A design requires a couple of layers of equipment, depending on the goal. We recently designed a system that includes VoIP technology to allow a mobile command vehicle to connect to the county telephone system by simply dialing a 3-digit extension. By incorporating VoIP, if the telephone company central office were damaged, there is still telephony between the site of the emergency command vehicle deployment and other county agencies,” Thienel said.
One client asked New Age to develop a prototype system for use at a mock school shooting. The goal was to provide video surveillance from inside the school to the SWAT vehicle. A system can be configured so not only would the command vehicle have access to video surveillance, but an individual patrol car could, too. SWAT members with cameras could send video among themselves and to commanders.
Part of Cisco’s involvement has been the development of secure communications so cannot intercept any part of the communications, including the video.
“No one can access the video surveillance unless someone gives them access,” Thienel said.
For example, cameras placed in banks can’t send video to the police unless the bank triggers it manually or by an alarm. Then, police could view the video remotely via the wireless connection. Homeland security applications include remote monitoring of water treatment plants and power stations.
