Radio IP improves data capabilities for Rhode Island police department

Radio IP Software this week announced that its wireless data connectivity solution is being used to IP enable the analog Dataradio wireless network of the Coventry Police Department in Rhode Island.

In January, Coventry began testing the Radio IP MTG software because its increasingly robust IMC mobile applications using PacketCluster technology caused transport on the 9600-baud Dataradio network to slow to unacceptable levels, said Sgt. Charles Bourret, Coventry police department’s MIS coordinator. With Radio IP’s compression and IP-optimization techniques to convert the data to IP, application performance has improved noticeably, he said.

“It would just slow down to the point it was unusable … we’d have officers waiting in their car 20 minutes to run a [license-plate check],” Bourret said. “Now, when an officer runs a plate, it takes about a minute.”

In addition to better performance, the IMC-Radio IP combination has been a maintenance boon, Bourret said. Instead of frequent calls to fix problems associated with the old system, the new solution has been “virtually hands free” with a 70% savings in the monthly maintenance contract, he said.

The Radio IP solution also includes encryption Coventry needed to continue accessing key law-enforcement databases from its 14-car fleet of marked vehicles.

And Coventry is not the only public-safety entity in the region to deploy Radio IP’s solution, according to a company press release.

“As it stands, Radio IP Software has succeeded in removing the limitations associated with Coventry’s Dataradio network,” Mike Bourre, Radio IP’s vice president of sales and marketing, said in a prepared statement. “Other agencies in the region with similar configurations have followed Coventry’s lead in deploying Radio IP MTG, including Grafton County, New Hampshire Sheriff’s Office running on a Motorola DataTAC network.”