New York City handed Northrop Grumman a five-year, $500 million contract to build and maintain a wireless broadband public-safety network designed to add high-speed data and video capabilities to the city’s first responders and transportation personnel.
The network will be built with San Bruno, Calif.-based IPWireless’ UMTS TD-CDMA technology, which the company says meets the requirements of the project. The network is expected to give public-safety workers access to federal and state anti-crime databases, fingerprint information, streaming video and other data at speeds much faster than those of the current system.
The five-year agreement calls for the first data network to be activated in Lower Manhattan by January, with the citywide network expected to be up and running by spring 2008. The city can renew the contract for another 10 years, as well as expand the network to meet future requirements, according to the deal.
Paul Cosgrave, commissioner of the city’s Department of Information and Telecommunications, pointed out that Northrop Grumman was awarded the contract after a lengthy evaluation, including a pilot implementation during which equipment was tested and evaluated.
The new network will allow fire, police and emergency-management agencies to communicate with each other, Northrop Grumman said–which is critical since New York was criticized for communications troubles among public-safety agencies during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“We believe that the performance of IPWireless’ UMTS TD-CDMA technology will be successful in supporting this vanguard initiative and the other public safety networks that follow New York’s lead,” said Bill Jones, chief operating officer at IPWireless.
IPWireless recently lost out on Sprint Nextel Corp.’s 2.5 GHz spectrum plans when the carrier decided to use WiMAX technology.
