Government Technology - January 2008 - (Page 52)

Autodesk Solutions for Public Works & Utilities Autodesk brings the entire lifecycle of any public works project into a single workflow C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 35 To ﬁnd out more visit www.dlt.com/autodesk/pwu-gov GSA# GS-35F-4543G Project leaders wanted to avoid installing a Wi-Fi access point for roughly every 150 feet of range, which a citywide Wi-Fi network would have required. “You need an awful lot of Wi-Fi nodes to cover a city that’s 6 miles by 6 miles,” said Jack McCoy, CIO of Manchester. “We tracked other technologies, and the WiMAX technology, as it was specified from the IEEE, seemed like it had more promise.” Manchester had an unpleasant experience with WiMAX in 2002 when it tried to use it to connect wireless Web surveillance cameras in a large city parking lot. The city could only find one vendor with a relevant WiMAX product that complied with both 802.11 and 802.16 wireless standards. “We had six respondents,” McCoy said. “Three were not compliant and didn’t even pretend to be. One was questionable, two had claims of compliance, but when you actually looked at it at the time, there was only really one that was compliant with the WiMAX standard.” Manchester hired the vendor and invested in a limited “point-to-point” WiMAX infrastructure for the parking lot. Technical obstacles plagued the process. “The vendor was just simply too new in the game at the time to keep it working at the production level we needed,” McCoy said. Manchester couldn’t afford to pay the vendor to maintain the application, forcing that job into the hands of the city’s IT staff. This made technical obstacles even more difficult to solve. The city did get the system to run video back and forth, but the video quality didn’t satisfy end-users. The solution stopped running altogether when the vendor issued an update patch. “It would be like having your Microsoft Windows operating system stop after the first security patch, and then not being able to get it going again,” McCoy said. The city removed the network and hired another vendor to use its own proprietary wireless equipment to run the cameras, which continue functioning and have aided several law enforcement efforts, according to McCoy. With more products and market experience in WiMAX now available, Manchester is ready to attempt another WiMAX project. McCoy is especially interested in WiMAX because Man- chester already has a fiber-optic network connecting all government buildings. This means the city has a ready-made infrastructure for deploying citywide WiMAX antennas. Those antennas could pass WiMAX signals back and forth to the antennas on other government buildings, completing the connectivity cloud. WiMAX signals reaching those antennas could also provide broadband to the government workers in the buildings themselves, via the fiber connected to the antennas. Manchester’s first step is to connect a retired firehouse to WiMAX using the fiber antenna at a nearby school. The firehouse functions as a technology resource center for citizens. The WiMAX equipment will perform a simple point-to-point function to connect equipment at the firehouse to broadband. Only people in the vicinity of the firehouse will have WiMAX access. “We haven’t bid it yet, but we have the funding and the elected officials who have given us the ‘go’ on it,” McCoy said. “This time I think we’re going to try to find two vendors — one on one side of the link, and the other on the other side of the link. They need to be vendors who can interoperate compatibly over the 802.11 and 802.16 standards. That will be another test, and hopefully that will remain in production.” If the small, $20,400 project is successful, McCoy hopes to expand the network citywide. Various mobile applications for keeping field workers out of offices and on the move would follow. Lesson Learned Any government wanting to operate WiMAX in only parts of its geography must make sure the network interoperates with 52 http://www.dlt.com/autodesk/pwu-gov http://www.dlt.com/autodesk/pwu-gov http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - January 2008

Government Technology - January 2008 Contents Point of View Big Picture The Last Mile On the Scene CIO Sightings Four Questions for... Spectrum Location, Location, Location Digital Governor Back to the Drawing Board Waukesha Goes Green Collaring Dangerous Dogs Public Sector Goes Web 2.0 Bounce Back SACWIS Rollout Simple Strategy Products Personal Computing How It Works signal:noise

Government Technology - January 2008

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