San Francisco '05

Plenary: Case Studies Panel

Case Study: Ripon, California

Ripon is an upscale community of 14,000 two miles north of Modesto and near Stockton. It is situated in a two-county area with 1 million population that has become notorious for crime and auto thefts.

Five years ago, Ripon had only one server for all departments and a one-page Web site. It now has 16 servers and a multi-page Web site.

About two and a half years ago, the city decided it wanted to look beyond cellular data and began a two-year project to deploy a citywide Wi-Fi network. It approached other cities and its own departments, and in April 2005 it released an RFP, including a map of the city and its requirements.

“It takes one passionate person with some backing from a governmental group, and we were off and running,” said Ripon Police Chief Richard Bull, who oversees the departments 24 officers.

Ripon settled on a Mesh Motorola network for a variety of governmental uses as well as unbroken connectivity at vehicle speeds of 100 mph. It awarded the bid to implement the network to Lockheed Martin, which took about a month. In July 2005, it began rolling out devices on streetlights. As of October, 90 percent of the network was deployed, including 23 video cameras in parks and in commercial and high traffic areas.

Case Study: Lenexa, Kansas

Lenexa, Kansas, (pop. 46,000) is one of 115 municipalities in the greater Kansas City area (pop. 1.7 million; 3,800 square miles). The daytime population swells to 80,000 because of the large number of business parks and high-tech distribution facilities within the city. For many years, Lenexa has been an industry leader in the area for its technology and the things that it has done.

Lenexa’s broadband wireless deployment was coordinated with Operation Greenlight, an organization covering the entire metropolitan area to regionally coordinate traffic signals, set up timing plans for major corridors, improve traffic flow, reduce fuel consumption and congestion, and improve emergency response.

Lenexa received a grant to install four miles of fiber-optic to connect 20 signals and provide 10 cameras for flow and traffic management. But as the IT department go got under way, it decided there were better ways to implement the network, and the state was willing to work with the city to modify its grant. It switched to wireless to connect all signals, install additional cameras, and work with Operation Greenlight. About 75 traffic lights will be connected by the end of 2006.

“It really changed in the process, and we’ll end up with a much better product and greater opportunities,” said Steve Schooley, Lenexa’s Transportation Manager.

Moreover, “the network can be used among all departments,” said Michael Lawrence, Lenexa’s CTO and Chief Information and Security Officer. “The silo mentality of most organizations must go. Share plans and goals.”

The project started with a fiber inventory and what the city needed to do to expand according to Operation Greenlight.

“The fiber inventory could be used to get to where we are today but make effective use of RF to cover everything and pushing RF density to the periphery of the city,” Lawrence said. “Funds would allow this on a much faster basis with wireless than with fiber.”

Phase 1 (Jan-Oct 2005) rolled out to the city’s highest-density area, to the east as fixed coverage through 5.8 GHz to building and traffic locations and 900 MHz over 12 square miles. The city is looking at 4.9 GHz spectrum and 14 units deployed under an FCC beta test agreement.

Current signal corridors with five digital cameras are operational. The newer Mpeg 4 encoding for video is very effective with minimal impact on RF bandwidth, Lawrence said.

The Police Department has not really jumped in. It has had DVR in its vehicles that downloads every day. But the department has become very intrigued with the video that is now being provided and has been able to route vehicles more expeditiously.

Phase 2 will include the less dense western half of the city.

Eight miles from city hall, the incumbent telco provider made it difficult to bring high-speed Internet to an amphitheater seating 340 persons that would serve as a disaster center, but the wireless has made it possible in the 5.8 range.

“Video is working very well,” Chief Bull said. “We had a lot of naysayers that said it’s not going to work. You have too many cameras.... Also, there was concern about how the public would take it, but we put it out on the front page. We said we were interested in maintaining the safety and quality of life, and we haven’t had any complaints.”

The police department uses the network to access GIS maps, hazmat and homeland security information, and warrants. An AP has been attached to the city’s mobile emergency command center, and more than 50 city vehicles have been installed with the wireless modems, bringing connectivity to publics works, city engineering, and the fire district. The additional units make the network more robust.

The city is in the final process of negotiating with the school district to provide broadband-wireless Internet connectivity and to deploy on-campus cameras.

“I see this as a project that’s going to go on for a long time,” Chief Bull said. “We have a city that’s growing rapidly, in part because of many people moving in and commuting to the Bay Area.” New subdivisions must install the mesh system with intelligent APs, routers, and cameras, further expanding the network at little cost to the city. “We’ve had good response from the developers,” Chief Bull said. “It’s a selling point.”

Additional uses for the network include:

• license scanning and identifying stolen cars coming into the community, especially from Hwy 99;
• adding VoIP for city buildings and in city vehicles and patrol cars;
• automated finger print ID system in the patrol cars (“We’re waiting on the county to have a system to hook up to”);
• public works and police and fire with GIS mapping (“It has just been a huge rush to add more documentation and data to this system that we can all use”).

While the city has future thoughts of making the network public, wireless and cable and DSL are already available in the city.

Case Study: Taipei, Taiwan

The City of Taipei has the second-highest population density in the world. In 1999, it began urging citizens to “frequent the net, and free up the roads. “ Taipei decided to begin transforming itself into a “ CyberCity” by delivering a full roster of e-Government services to its 120,000 house-holds, expanding school computer facilities, and creating Web sites to integrate municipal agencies and public schools.

As part of a follow-up plan, in February 2004, the CyberCity initiative took a new and exciting turn with the launch of a broad-scale wireless infrastructure project to bring ubiquitous broadband access to 90 percent of citizens. With the goal of positioning Taipei as the world’s first complete mobile city, the M-Taipei Project will bridge the digital divide, revolutionize communications, provide innovative services to citizens, and fuel the development of the city’s domestic IT industry.

Through a nine-year public-private partnership between the city and Q-Ware Systems, a successful Mainland systems provider, M-Taipei will be owned and operated by Q-ware Systems while the city provides lamps, trees, subway stations, and public buildings to enable Q-ware to install access points.

“We’re trying to help Q-ware do the job smoothly, so we have made an administrative mandate for the power supply and the backhaul transmission to reduce their uncertainties and their risk in this project, “ said Deputy Mayor Pu-Tsung King. M-Taipei is set up to take advantage of market forces by serving both general consumers and the government at the same time. Q-ware will bare the risks of running the business, while sharing 1 to 3 percent of its revenues with the city.

King added: “ The market is the most viable mechanism of developing wireless LAN because of the high-power incentive. The government sector is always labeled the low-powered incentives partner. For our part, we must release as many resources, legally, as possible, to keep [Q-Ware] in the game. We cannot afford to have this project fail.“

Nevertheless, the effort has generated a political risk for the government. “We’re very cautious because we must face the city council,“ King says. The three-phased rollout is scheduled for completion in June 2006.

Taipei has applied an ecosystem concept to generate a bundle effect of applications and services. “Wi-Fi must ally with other services to share the network’s effects,“ King says. “We tried to make products compatible with the network.“

The downstream market includes handheld devices and content applications, so the network will enable high-bandwidth mobile, voice, Internet, video, and multimedia applications, some of which will be accessible by cell phones and PDAs. These devices will have public-transport and micro-payment chips as well as voice-over IP.

“We’re sure VoIP is going to be a killer application for the citizens of Taipei because they all are naturally technology savvy,“ King says. Streaming video, ring tones, and messaging will also be enabled over the network.

M-Taipei envisions an almost endless array of applications, from e-Business and e-Education to GIS, high-tech corridors, enterprise, industrial parks, and intelligent transport. Q-Ware’s WIFLY service will connect public schools, financially disadvantaged families, disadvantaged citizens, and government agencies as well as provide a revenue-generating commercial service.

Case Study: Cleveland, Ohio

OneCleveland is community-driven nonprofit organization focusing broadband wireless solutions for government, healthcare, and nonprofit initiatives in the greater Cleveland area to enable and transform the region.

OneCleveland provides support to the champions that want access to new and innovative applications. To do that, it partners with corporations to provide innovative solutions and transform the ways communities do business.

About four years ago, OneCleveland started out of Case Western with an eye toward taking advantage of fiber in the region. The nonprofit spun off with a specific focus on applications and outsourcing services to the private sector.

“The advantage is that it can cross political boundaries and agendas, including incumbent mayors and city councils,” said Mark Ansboury, COO, OneCleveland. “We really focus on government applications and healthcare and changing our regions’ view through grant and nontraditional funding opportunities.”

The City of Cleveland is on its board.

OneClevland has received donated fiber which serves as a platform to connect interested communities.

“We weren’t going to build additional fiber, and we developed arrangements with TimeWarner and Adelphia to provide last-mile connectivity and services for us to extend its reach,” Ansboury said.

On top of this, fiber can’t be the entire solution. “Let’s find the best model that works within each community and provide the best possible service available so that everyone can get access to the services. You’ve got to have good solid backhaul, and you’ve got to have the mechanism to bring those services back and integrate the applications: healthcare, nonprofits, education, applications.”

OneCleveland is building a regional collaboration and integration model that looks at all the providers in municipal, public, and private environments. OneCleveland then becomes the gateway between all the clusters of wireless mesh networks.

“A real goal here is the aggregation model,” Ansboury said. “We do believe in the anchor tenant model: major universities, healthcare centers, serving as anchor tenants and becoming good community citizens to extend the wireless reach.”

Wherever OneCleveldn finds the right partners, its goal is to “go to contract” through a “multi-tiered provider model and vendor approach,” including public-private offerings and public and private participation.

Some projects include:

• Public Square project: “There were two access networks at first, and now there are 27, forcing OneClevelend to nearly quadruple access points.

• City of Cleveland: “A few hotspots and zones to facilitate mobility and integration for filing for the water department for the city.”

• University Circle: A large area, with museums, high-end public institutions; indoor-outdoor wireless. “You go from one museum to the next, tying that in with AV, RFID—what’s the art I am looking at? Who’s the creator?”

• Experimenting with VoIP and video: Multicast in the fiber network infrastructure, doing real-time feeds. 1.6 MB video streams for full screen IPTV.

• Cleveland Clinic: Indoor-outdoor, 2000 wireless APs. A lot of the apps are RFID apps, resource management, record tracking, doctor and nurse are, where is the patient? Does the record match with the patient. Back-office integration applications. To be opened to the public.