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New Orleans Selects Metro-Scale Wi-Fi Network

Wireless network will support police citywide video surveillance system.

NEW ORLEANS -- New Orleans, Louisiana, has selected Tropos Networks' metro-scale Wi-Fi equipment for use in the city's surveillance camera project. New Orleans will use the equipment to build a citywide wireless video surveillance network.

The surveillance system will use the Neighborhood WatchCam, developed by Active Video Solutions. It will be deployed by Southern Electronics, with Verge Wireless Networks serving as the integrator and installer for this wireless network system.

"The video surveillance capabilities enabled by the Tropos metro-scale Wi-Fi network help make citizens throughout New Orleans safer," said C. Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans. "Quickly giving our police department, in effect, extra eyes to patrol our city will deter crime and help apprehend perpetrators when incidents do occur."

The network will operate in areas where video surveillance cameras are deployed. It will quickly and economically supply network connectivity to video cameras in locations where there is no access to the city's wired network. It can also provide broadband wireless data connections for police officers, allowing them to view surveillance camera video while in the field.

The New Orleans network will employ the company's 5110 Wi-Fi cells, an outdoor-optimized and ruggedized node based on the 802.11 standard, on a citywide basis. The node quickly and economically uses Predictive Wireless Routing Protocol (PWRP) to provide pervasive coverage over metro areas. The PWRP routes traffic wirelessly, eliminating up to 95 percent of the wired backhaul associated with traditional access point solutions. The company's Wi-Fi cells form a wireless mesh, dynamically routing traffic along the highest throughput path to a wired gateway. This routing negates effects of radio frequency interference, wired backhaul failure and node failure. PWRP also scales to thousands of nodes with the lowest routing overhead in the industry.
Miriam Jones is a former chief copy editor of Government Technology, Governing, Public CIO and Emergency Management magazines.