New York City delivers mobility in a carrier-free world

NEW YORK CITY — Mobile broadband is being delivered outside the carrier framework to this city’s brass and dozens of of city agencies. After being solely reliant on carriers for mobility before, the city began making moves in 2006 to launch a private wireless network for police, fire and dozens of government agencies with the support of Northrop Grumman Corp.
The New York City Wireless Network, or NYCWiN for short, was officially launched in May 2009 and now has more than 380 radio sites installed (mostly on rooftops) throughout all of the city’s five boroughs. The city claims 99% reliable coverage on the simulcast network and dozens of city agencies are already up and running on the system today.
The underlying need for the network lies with public safety and a focus on services delivered by various city agencies to its residents.
Some of the applications being used today include meter reading, mobile data apps, remote traffic signal monitoring and control, sensor connectivity, mobile video, license plate recognition, emergency call boxes and automatic vehicle location.
The network coupled with the city’s vast amounts of data opens the door to more use cases like restaurant, day care and building inspectors. The city is also considering smart grid installations and gas systems potentially under a private/public partnership.
Water meter reading is “one of the greatest stories,” said Steven Harte, associate commissioner of wireless technologies with the City of New York’s department of information technology and telecommunications. There are now 600,000 wireless-modem equipped meters in the city that are able to deliver daily readings four times a day. Before NYCWiN was in place, there was only an 85% water meter read rate. There are plans to expand to 850,000 wireless equipped water meters.
Battling weather with mobility
Earlier this year when RCR Wireless News visited New York City during a blizzard, the city used the opportunity to demonstrate the capability of its snow scouts, a fleet of city vehicles that stream live video to show where the trouble spots lie and where snowplowing is most badly needed.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg held a press conference to highlight some of the improved efficiencies that have come with the city’s investment in NYCWiN. GPS-equipped snow plows can quickly alert officials when they get stuck and the city has plans to equip more of its fleet with the same capability.
As for the expense, “it’s not terribly expensive in the grand scheme of things,” Bloomberg said. “It’s a very sophisticated system.” On average, the devices going into the trucks run about $40 per month, he added.
Improving emergency response
With the New York City Fire Department, one of the goals of NYCWiN is to merge the world between broadband and point-to-point radio communications.
All of the information from the ground is transmitted in real time, streaming to others in the field or in stations while all emergency calls are stored on the city’s servers.
“We’re now monitoring fire ground communication point to point,” Harte said. “It’s something we’re proud of.” Firefighters can listen to the event in real time without having to be within reach of radio traffic and commanders can determine the severity of the incident before deploying additional resources.
Harte called it an “example of bridging the gap between mission-critical voice and mobile data.”
NYCWiN’s objective
“One of the key factors of our network is mobility,” Harte told RCR Wireless News. There are multiple connectivity options on devices for the city’s fleets and the city is beginning to look at MiFi as a more nimble option down the line, but government is always looking for stability in its investments.
“We like to build platforms that last 10 years,” Harte said.
NYCWiN used 10 MHz of subleased spectrum in the 2.5 GHz band. It currently operates on UMTS, but there is a roadmap for a transition to LTE. Chipsets include some form factors that insert into laptops, using a modular approach so the chips can be swapped out to other devices too.
An operations center at Northrop Grumman’s offices in Brooklyn is monitored around the clock and there is a secondary operations city elsewhere in the city along with two network cores.
“Redundancy is key to how we build out the network,” Harte said. “It really sets us apart from any commercially available option.”
The service level agreement with Northrop Grumman calls for data speeds of 450 Kbps up and 1.25 Mbps down, however Harte said most users are seeing around three times that in the field.
The city also requires always-on connectivity with a backhaul framework that will allow every user to consistently update and store data every second.
“Every transaction over the network is encrypted and secure regardless of whether it’s fixed or mobile,” Harte said.
“We’re finding that the carriers didn’t really want to offer up their bandwidth to allow that,” he added.
“It’s the beginning of a new age of mission critical apps,” he said. Not every agency requires always-on connectivity, so the apps and their priority level is determined on an agency by agency basis.