In government tent, public safety becomes long pole

by Ed Gubbins

City, state and federal governments have long been dependable consumers (and in some cases providers) of infocomm services. While government agencies are usually typecast as having deep pockets, the recession has been especially tough on states, which is one reason they have been targeted as key beneficiaries of federal stimulus efforts.

One line within government budgets that is particularly resistant to swings in the overall economy is public safety technology, which is why it is driving spending inside and outside of stimulus efforts.

“In large part, when no one else gets money, public safety still gets money,” said Craig Settles, a consultant with Successful.com. “Generally if you're smart, you say, ‘I want to hang out with those guys.’”

In this harsh economy, governments are increasingly looking to shave costs by consolidating telecom and IT resources once allotted to disparate agencies. In that way, public safety can become the lynchpin for a variety of services across a range of largely unrelated users. The state of Oregon is consolidating networks used by the departments of state police, forestry and transportation to achieve a statewide public safety network that takes advantage of the cost benefits of shared infrastructure. The citywide wireless broadband network in Oklahoma City, which covers 555 square miles, now runs more than 200 applications for the police, fire department, transit authority and other agencies — everything from computer-aided dispatch to video monitoring and GPS tracking systems — and carries more than 4 terabytes of traffic each month.

While allowing shared use of infrastructure helps governments cut costs, it also increases the need for greater security and redundancy, as the managers of public safety networks can be resistant to integrating with non-emergency systems.

“A lot of them have legacy technology that is proprietary and closed,” Settles said. “When you ask them to be in an integrated network, it violates the culture of public safety. Some of these guys are not happy campers.”

Some states are collaborating with the private sector to help defray some of the costs of public safety technology. In Louisiana, for example, ERF Wireless is two years into building a statewide wireless broadband network (with 18 months to go), whose capacity it will share with state government while it uses the rest of the bandwidth to sell services to business customers. The network is being built on towers owned by the state police, which lacked the funding to interconnect them. ERF is linking the towers in exchange for backup power and a portion of the capacity. In return, it will give the state more capacity during emergencies and zoomable cameras on the towers for police use.

In fact, governments are increasingly finding that video, especially IP video, has applications beyond public safety. The city of Roseville, Calif., is using IP video surveillance systems — integrated with Ethernet-over-copper networks and affixed to traffic lights — to monitor and even control traffic flow, allowing residents to view traffic patterns live on the Web. Because the system has obvious public safety implications, it is one more example of public safety as essentially the long pole in a large tent under which a range of infocomm technologies and services are changing the way governments work.