Radio IP, Dell land Broward County contract

Radio IP Software last week announced that it and Dell have been selected jointly by the sheriff’s office in Broward County, Fla., to provide a wireless data solution for 1200 mobile law-enforcement workers in the county.

Using Radio IP’s MTG with RadioRoam software and primarily Dell Latitude notebooks, Broward County hopes to realize greater data performance, stability and interoperability while serving law-enforcement, fire-rescue and department of detention personnel.

Broward County has a Motorola DataTAC network that uses proprietary protocols and provides data rates of 19.2 KB/s, said Mike Bourre, Radio IP’s vice president of sales and marketing. With the Radio IP solution, the data on the network is transformed to IP, allowing interoperability with other systems, he said.

And this flexibility is not gained at the expense of performance, Bourre said.

“We typically double the speed of these networks through our compression and our optimized TCP/IP,” Bourre said. “Every wireless network has its strengths and weaknesses … We try to patch up the weaknesses in wireless networks.”

Indeed, Radio IP software solutions can be used to bolster security and to provide application session persistence for mobile workers roaming between disparate networks, Bourre said. This allows entities to participate in the IP migration while continuing to reap benefits from their investments in oft-reliable legacy data networks, he said.

“Basically, these customers with these older systems can now communicate with anything else, … even though they are on a proprietary network,” Bourre said.

With the Radio IP/Dell solution, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office personnel can roam between the DataTAC network and 802.11 hot spots. The sheriff’s office plans to integrate Motorola’s High Performance Data (HPD) and mesh solutions in the near future.

“Motorola developed the technical roadmap and provided the infrastructure for our public-safety wide area network,” Eugene Vardaman, director of communications technology at the Broward Sheriff’s Office, said in a prepared statement. “An integral component of our overall mobile project was the selection of Radio IP due to its performance and reliability.”