It's not quite the immortal Ron Burgundy line from the movie Anchorman, but Nokia (News - Alert) is actively working with the City of San Diego to help its residents stay a little safer. This is thanks to some new augmentations in the city's public safety systems. Now, the eighth largest city in the United States will be able to deliver better responses and help keep its citizens safe.
Nokia's new systems should give San Diego public safety a lot more operational capacity, thanks to the use of Internet protocol / Multi-protocol Label Switching (IP / MPLS) systems, along with packet microwave radio systems that will help first responders better connect in emergencies and pass information along accordingly. Meanwhile, San Diego is putting its own data network into the project to provide backhaul services for the P25 digital trunked radio system, allowing for both high-capacity and high-speed connections. There's even sufficient bandwidth for video surveillance and support for supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) operations.
Nokia's also chipping in some hardware, including its:
- 9500 Microwave Packet Radio
- 7750 Service Router
- 7210 Service Access Switch
- 7705 Service Aggregation Router
In addition, the Nokia's 5620 Service Aware (News - Alert) Manager will oversee the system managing video, time-division multiplexer (TDM) and Ethernet services as San Diego continues moving its networks to being all-IP. And, just to round it all out, Nokia will be providing useful services which include field maintenance, tower construction, network design and engineering, and several others.
Kamal Ballout, who serves as Nokia's head of sales in the global enterprise and public sector for the U.S market, commented “Municipal communications networks, particularly in large cities like San Diego, are facing enormous demands as more bandwidth-intensive applications such as video are utilized for public safety and other municipal services. Nokia has the premier end-to-end public safety networking solution to address mission-critical requirements.”
Those enormous demands aren't only faced by municipal communications networks. We all know from even casual observation that an increase in streaming video is driving such demands, and that's before we throw in the rise of cloud-based systems and connected appliances that we're seeing every day. Regardless of what direction we look, we know that greater bandwidth demand isn't just on the table today, but will likely be a part of the overall environment for some time to come. Nokia's move to provide more bandwidth, and more highly-specific tools, should go a long way toward improving public safety systems' ability to respond by giving these more to work with that's specifically intended for public safety use.
As frequent visitors to the Next Generation Communications Community are aware, Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) which is now part of the new Nokia, has long been a leader in providing public safety organizations purpose-built networking capabilities to enable them to keep up with the intense demands on their networks and allow them to provide enhanced and more responsive services. San Diego is clearly a place for other municipalities to look when they are evaluating their own future networking needs.
Edited by
Peter Bernstein
