LOS ANGELES—New York City handed Northrop Grumman a five-year $500 million contract to build and maintain a wireless broadband public-safety network that will 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 fail-safe requirements of the project that’s expected to give public-safety workers access to federal and state anti-crime databases, fingerprints, streaming video and other data at much faster speeds than the current system. The five-year agreement calls for the first data network to be activated in Lower Manhattan by January 2007 with the citywide network expected to be up and running by spring 2008. The contract also spells out that the has the city can later renew the contract for another 10 years, as well as expand the network to meet future requirements.
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 in lower Manhattan during which equipment was tested and evaluated.
The agreement comes after New York came under criticism for not having a better system in place on Sept. 11, 2001. The new network will allow fire, police and emergency management agencies to communicate with each other, Northrop Grumman said.
IPWireless lost out on Sprint Nextel’s fourth-generation business after the carrier chose WiMAX technology over IPWireless’ UMTS TD-CDMA equipment.
“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.
