Features

Imagine a community where citizens do not have to wait in lines at city hall, public safety officers, first responders and emergency medical personnel can communicate via live video during incident response, and schoolchildren receive laptops to collaborate at home with fellow classmates on assignments or use the Internet for research. This city exists today–Corpus Christi, Texas, which has built a city-owned, multipurpose wireless broadband network.

“The Corpus Christi wireless broadband initiative represents a comprehensive technology transformation,” says Ogilvie Gericke, director, municipal information systems for Corpus Christi, who has championed the next stage of e-government for the city. “The transformation has enveloped multiple city departments, county agencies, the school system, business community, and the regional transportation and port authorities. The deployment of the broadband wireless network significantly advances the region’s e-connectivity, resulting in improved worker productivity, public safety and medical services response, and public access to government operations.”

Currently, the Wi-Fi network, or Wi-Fi cloud, provides wireless coverage to areas representing 85% of the city’s population, and will be 100% complete across the 147 square miles of the city by this fall. The total budget for the Wi-Fi project is $7.1 million–$1.1 million for the pilot project and $6 million for the citywide build-out.

Corpus Christi, a city of 277,000 residents, came upon the idea in 2003 while investigating ways to update aging water and gas meters, and to find a safe alternative to read utility meters remotely rather than sending field workers out. The result is an automated meter-reading system that streamlines services for city workers and makes their processes more efficient.

This cornerstone application, contracted to Northrop Grumman Corp., uses the wireless network for data backhaul and helped demonstrate to other departments and agencies the potential for service and operations enhancements available with advanced communications and connectivity technology.
“Seventy percent of our city employees work in the field,” Gericke says.

“Enabling them to send and receive data from anywhere in the city reduces travel–saving both time and money.”

The possibilities grew from there as city officials discussed the uses of municipal wireless. Wi-Fi could be used to track city vehicles, allow police cars to send and receive streaming video, and enable ambulance crews to send video to emergency room physicians. Wi-Fi also appeals to individuals who want to access the Internet using laptops or other Wi-Fi-enabled devices, and to businesses that also want to transmit data to and from the field.

Approximately 1,600 Tropos Networks wireless routers are being installed in a grid across the populous areas of the city’s corporate limits to provide coverage, with a minimum throughput of 512 Kbps to 1 Mbps on average, which meets the qualifying standard for high-speed wireless. The mesh Wi-Fi network provides a technologically advanced, multipurpose, open wireless system, with coverage and bandwidth available for a multitude of cost-saving applications in all city departments.

Drive down a street in Corpus Christi and you will notice radio nodes attached to city streetlights, traffic signals, towers and buildings. The nodes form a self-healing, self-routing network, with dynamic switching between nodes, allowing mobile connectivity without data loss.

The Tropos MetroMesh system interlinks to the city’s fiber-optic network at more than 90 points, with supplementary wireless backhaul connecting outlying areas to the network–for example, a point-to-point wireless connection between the mainland and MetroMesh networks on Padre Island. The technologies were selected based on their capabilities in an outdoor, metro-scale deployment, bandwidth performance, reliability, open-standards architecture, compatibility with all common 802.11 devices and wireless cards, scalability and cost-effectiveness.

Northrop Grumman provided conceptualization, design, installation, integration and support services for the network. The company is also assisting the city to ensure that its IT department’s capabilities, systems, processes and infrastructure are upgraded to support the increased requirements of the technology.

The C. C. Digital Community Development Corp. was established by the city to run the Wi-Fi project and related support operations, with an initial annual budget of $2.5 million. Half of those funds are directly dedicated to Wi-Fi maintenance and operations. The network is designed to be completely self-supporting, including the repayment of the initial debt.

isps to take over
The Wi-Fi network has rapidly evolved to a community-wide e-government connectivity platform and resource, as applications now link multiple departments of city and regional governments to citizens and their wireless devices anywhere in the city, and several miles into Corpus Christi Bay. Currently, the city maintains the network and provides limited customer support and service. This will transition as the network becomes more commercialized and become the responsibility of the ISPs that provide Internet service over the network.

“We have made a concerted effort to keep our staffing to a minimum to help ease the burden on our taxpayers,” says Gericke. “Currently, we have five employees dedicated to the system. We plan to maintain this level of staffing as the ISPs will take on most customer support and NOC responsibilities. The city will maintain the physical support of the system.

“This first-of-its-kind metro-scale wireless e-government transformation is positively enhancing the city’s service to its citizens by making field operations from every department more efficient, and by facilitating multilateral community access and communications to government, education and other public service agencies,” Gericke explains.

As a result of this e-government enhancement initiative and the industry technology partnerships it has fostered, Corpus Christi has expanded its service portfolio to include community broadband wireless. The government-owned/industry-partnered nature of the business model under which the system is being implemented is working for this city, contends Gericke.

The city plans to remain a wholesaler of the bandwidth, but the captive portal and all associated URLs will always be free to the public, providing access to all government-related sites. In addition, a local business portal will be available free to the public, providing a local “Yellow Page” presence for businesses, as well as establishing a commercial search engine to assist local residents and visitors with purchase access to local goods and services.

“What we have implemented appears to be a viable business model for other cities considering meeting the requirements of their corporate charter with new-age services such as community broadband wireless,” he says.

Corpus Christi’s Wi-Fi network allows effective delivery with mobility over a metro-scale of advanced voice, video and data services. As workers and companies see the opportunities to use the network, new and innovative application concepts constantly arise, including equipping firefighters and SWAT teams with locator chips and helmet-mounted wireless video cameras to help incident commanders and field personnel at the scene share knowledge during emergencies.

The fast, low-cost and simple wireless broadband delivery provided by the city-owned network has enabled valuable, cost-saving, efficiency-enhancing, service-improving applications throughout the city’s service enterprise, Gericke says. “Moreover, bridging the last mile and mobility mile of e-connectivity to city field operations and every citizen promises to further transform the concept of e-government to a higher purpose and performance standard–one that seamlessly connects people at all levels within the government and the community in real-time.”

Leonard Scott is the business unit manager, municipal information systems department, for Corpus Christi, Texas.

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