Lincoln Likes Wireless

Can a mid-size city with a modest IT budget launch wireless applications by the score and not end up with egg on its face?

With a population of approximately 225,000 spread over a 76 square-mile area, Lincoln, Neb., has been rolling out wireless applications to its city agencies since 2001.

Mayor Don Wesely said his role in making wireless happen is simple.

"I'm not a techie," he said. "I'm not the innovator. I'm the supporter, and that means finding [our IT staff] the money to buy the equipment that they need and then letting them do it. I feel like you have to have an environment where you say, 'Let's be innovative, and let's take some risks to try something new and see if it works.'"

Get the Ball Rolling
The city's first wireless project started with a pilot for its Animal Control Division, explained Terry Lowe, systems project supervisor of the city's Information Services Division.

"It was manageable in size," he said, noting that 10 animal control officers helped test wireless applications and reception. "It's a group that's outside, so we could see how the weather treated us. We get some pretty brutal winters and some hot summers, so we wanted to get a good field test for that."

Lowe said cost is the main reason the city could rapidly push wireless applications out to agencies; going wireless turned out to be amazingly cheap.

The city chose the Palm 7x, bought the devices for $200 and received a $100 rebate on the Palm service. By contrast, the laptops used in the city's police cars cost approximately $5,000 apiece, Lowe said.

The cost of data transfer was also appealing, he said.

"This isn't like a cell phone; on a cell phone, you pay for data by the minute," he said. "On Palm.net service, you pay by the K [kilobit]. They have an unlimited license available, so for $35 per month, I can have these things in people's hands 24 by seven. They can use them as much as they want."

Though cost is important, performance is equally critical. Lowe said the handheld devices' performance made the transition easy when field personnel saw just how well the devices worked.

"We benchmarked the devices, and the data that the first wireless application used lived on an IBM mainframe," he said. "That was the challenge: Could we go out to that box, retrieve the information quickly, format it and get it through the Palm.net service? It was incredibly fast. We benchmarked against the same exact information being accessed by the mobile data terminals in the police cruisers -- this is not slamming radio bandwidth; that's the issue -- but the handhelds were three times faster than the laptops."

Animal-control personnel considered the handhelds extremely useful.

"The real-time access is like having the mainframe in your pocket," Lowe said. "It's a very inexpensive way to deliver decision-making data."

Branching Out
From there, Lowe said other agencies came knocking on his door.

The Lincoln Police Department is now using the handheld devices to supplement the mobile data terminals in their cruisers. Parking-enforcement agents use the handhelds to issue tickets, access warrant information, and check vehicle registrations and license tags.

"We're going to keep going with rolling these wireless applications out," he said. "We've integrated all of our platforms to be Web enabled, so it doesn't make any difference where the data lives. We even bridge over to the criminal-justice system, even though that data is on a completely different platform. We have a street finder that ties to our GIS servers -- people can type in a street name, get the directions, and there's also a button that allows people to access our