PacketHop announces first product
DENVER–Software vendor PacketHop today announced the release of its first commercial products at the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officers (APCO) conference.
PacketHop will make the 1.0 release of its TrueMesh mobile mesh-networking software and its Aware for Public Safety suite of applications, said David Thompson, PacketHop’s vice president of marketing. The product package is expected to be generally available in mid-September, Thompson said.
PacketHop has spent the last year and a half “making a lot of technical advancements and solving a lot of really had problems” since demonstrating an alpha version of its mobile mesh-networking software during a trial near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco early in 2004, Thompson said.
“Now, it’s secure, scalable, mission-critical and reusable,” he said. “No other system out there brings the same kind of value leveraging standards-based technology.”
Unlike other mesh-networking solutions, PacketHop’s architecture enables multimedia communications via a variety of devices connected in an ad hoc mesh–typically linked in the 2.4 GHz unlicensed band–solely through software.
“PacketHop’s technology enables police officers to better serve the community by providing wireless access to mission-critical multimedia content such as real-time video streams or resource tracking,” Fremont, Calif., Police Chief Craig Steckler said in a prepared statement. “PacketHop can help public-safety agencies save money by avoiding costly infrastructure deployments while enabling us to safely and efficiently conduct frequently occurring aspects of our job such as investigative surveillance, tactical assault and containment and multi-agency incidents.”
Although PacketHop has developed an application suite, Thompson said the company hopes to establish a developers’ group to let third-party developers create their own applications.
