Top 5 stories: Week of Oct. 31-Nov. 6

Here’s a look at the most popular stories on IWCE’s Urgent Communications from the last week.

1.  “Newscan FCC to fine M.C. Dean electrical contracting company 718,000 for Wi-Fi blocking at Baltimore conventions ” – In this roundup of worldwide critical-communications news, the FCC announces the $718,000 penalty proposed for M.C. Dean, Inc. for disabling and interfering with consumers’ Wi-Fi devices at the Baltimore Convention Center (BCC). The announcement states, “Wi-Fi blocking threatens to stymie wireless innovation and the availability of Wi-Fi as an important Internet access technology. Our action today advances the Commission’s longstanding goal of ensuring that all authorized communications– including Wi-Fi transmissions – occur free of malicious disruptions.”
2. “Harris showcases Signal Sentry 1000 solution that detects, locates GPS-jamming sources” – ​ At the recent IACP 2015 show, Harris introduced its Signal Sentry 1000, which delivers real-time information to critical-infrastructure operators to identify and mitigate the issue of Global Positioning System (GPS) jamming. “What it does is that we’ll take a network of sensors—a minimum of four, and we can scale it to as many as we need to cover the size of the critical infrastructure or any area of interest—that will detect any interference in the same frequency band as the GPS L1 signal, the civil signal,” Joe Rolli, business development manager for the Harris precision navigation and timing business unit, said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.
3. “Mutualink, Intel team to provide wearable public-safety gateway with WiFi, Bluetooth connectivity” – Myriad devices – from biometric sensors to body-worn cameras – can be connected via wire, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi through Mutualink’s new Wearable Smart Gateway, a lightweight device powered by Intel’s Edison chip for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, according to Mike Wengrovitz, Mutualinks’ vice president of innovation. “We basically shrunk down the servers that we use for collaboration now and made them postage-stamp sized—and, by the time you put a battery in it, they become palm sized,” Wengrovitz said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “We took all of the data from all of those things that you were wearing, carrying or were nearby on one side [of the wearable gateway], and on the other side, they telemeter back through a secure tunnel to a command post.
4. “Global marketplace critical to success of public-safety broadband initiatives” – IWCE’s Urgent Communications Donny Jackson reflects on the first meeting of the International Forum to Advance First Responder Innovation, where the differences and likenesses between the U.S. and global concept of public-safety were highlighted. Jackson notes some of the challenges in the fragmented public-safety market for land-mobile-radio (LMR). “When you combine an already fragmented market with the specialized needs for hardening/reliability, the cost of doing business in the public-safety sector goes up, and that results in higher-priced equipment. These costs look even worse in comparison to the commercial cellular market, which benefits from global standards that result in massive economies-of-scale efficiencies that drive lower prices,” he writes.
5. “Video: Motorola Solutions: Steve Sebestyen explains how broad product portfolio helps public safety” – In this video, Steve Sebestyen, Motorola Solutions public-safety development manager and public-safety evangelist, shares some perspective on how various products in his company’s portfolio have the capability to assist public-safety agencies in predicting, responding to and investing incidents.