WASHINGTON—Northrop Grumman Corp.’s five-year, $500 million contract to build a broadband public-safety wireless network in New York City could become the new model for equipping city and state officials with state-of-the-art equipment that enables interoperable voice and data communications offered not by a single vendor, but rather by a systems integrator.
Northrop Grumman’s wireless public-safety plan for New York City is driven by a standards-based mobile broadband wireless technology provided by IPWireless, of San Bruno, Calif. The technology delivers broadband mobility, high capacity, reliability, and scalability, all necessary to meet real-time, fail-safe public-safety requirements for a city whose first responders encountered severe communications problems after the Sept. 11 attacks.
So what then is a major defense contractor that builds fighter planes and battleships doing in a market long dominated by Motorola Inc?
“About five years ago, Northrop Grumman did start investing in wireless with the understanding that there would come a day when government users were going to want to go mobile and that present users were going to want to expand their use of wireless to be way more useful to them than just a radio,” said Mark Adams, chief architect of networks and communications at Northrop Grumman’s Information Technologies unit.
However, Adams, speaking at the Wireless Communications Association International conference last week, was quick to say that because public-safety radios remain so important to government users in saving lives that crafting a broadband solution that incorporates them is essential. “One of our themes in our process is not to take away something, but to add capabilities for the government user,” said Adams.
Wireless security historically has been a major deterrent in getting state and local governments to embrace mission-critical wireless broadband solutions. Adams added the public-private approach for interoperable public-safety wireless broadband communications pursued by Cyren Call Communications and others is worth studying.
“Personally I’m disgusted by the fights and the inability for our government to find spectrum for those purposes,” said Adams. Three years ago the Federal Communications Commission rejected Northrop Grumman’s petition to set aside an additional 10 megahertz at 700 MHz for broadband public safety. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told Congress he planned to seek public comment on Cyren Call’s request for 30 megahertz to be reallocated for the same purpose, but the agency has yet to do so. The FCC, meantime, is working on rules for a separate 24 megahertz at 700 MHz for public safety communications, but there is concern that that spectrum alone is not sufficient to support wireless broadband public-safety applications.
