Podcast 9
Transitioning from Agency-Owned to Commercial Wireless Data Networks
Topic/Title: "Transitioning from Agency-Owned to Commercial Wireless Data Networks"
Description: Kitsap County, Washington, is a key participant in a project funded by a COPS 2007 Technology grant to connect agencies on the western side of Puget Sound to shared data systems. The Bremerton Police Department received the grant in partnership with Kitsap County, other municipal jurisdictions, and two Indian nations. At the center of the project has been replacement of an agency-owned wireless data network with commercial services.
Participants:
Lt. John Sprague
Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office
Washington
Dan Hawkins
Public Safety Technology Specialist
SEARCH, The National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics
Recorded: April 26, 2010
Podcast Length: 27:41:00
Dan Hawkins: The following is another in a series of recorded audio interviews on lessons learned and best practices from projects funded through COPS technology grants. These podcasts are presented by SEARCH, The National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics through funding from the U. S. Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, COPS, under Cooperative Agreement 2007‑CK‑WX‑K002.
Today's topic is Transitioning from Agency‑Owned to Commercial Wireless Data Networks. Our guest is Lieutenant John Sprague, with the Kitsap County Sheriff's Office in Washington. I'm Dan Hawkins, a Public Safety Technology Specialist for SEARCH and moderator of this podcast.
Kitsap County is a key participant in a project funded by a COPS 2007 technology grant to connect agencies on the western side of the Puget Sound to shared data systems. Bremerton Police Department received the grant and partnership of Kitsap County, other municipal jurisdictions, and two Indian nations.
At the center of the project has been replacement of an agency‑owned wireless data network with commercial services.
John, welcome. Can you tell us a bit about the project with Bremerton and share your background with it?
John Sprague: Sure. I've been with the County here in the sheriff's office for about 23 years. And since about 1996 I've been involved in the planning for the mobile data system, and it's gone through a couple of variations. But we found that our old UHF 9600 Baud network just wasn't getting us where we wanted to be as far as providing applications out to the field.
And so that was the crux of our project was to bring in a new network and bring new applications out to the field so that the officers could have better tools rather than having to come back to the office or rely on support staff to do a number of their tasks.
Dan: Let's talk a little bit about your previous mobile data network. It was similar to others around the country based on land, mobile, or radio technologies. What was it put in originally for?
John: The original thrust was to reduce the congestion on our voice channel. We used to be isolated to just two voice dispatch channels for all the agencies in the county. So that would be four police departments, the two Tribal police agencies, and the sheriff's office.
In clear back in mid‑nineties they commissioned a report, and basically what the report came back as saying was that we would have to add voice channels and dispatch staff. But one of the ways to mitigate that was to bring in mobile data so the officers could be doing more of the work in the field and to get them to the point where they could actually see the CAD [Computer Aided Dispatch], or the computer data printouts, right out in the field without having to be on the voice radio quite so much.
So that was the start of it. And when it first came in, pretty soon they found that there was going to be some interface work needed to get the CAD system online. And so they started out taking a little slower step by bringing it in with just running messages between units and having querying ability for looking at licensing wants and warrants of that sort.
So it took a few years before all the designing and engineering could get to the place where we could bring CAD out to the cars.
Dan: Did you eventually see some reduction in voice traffic after it was installed?
John: Right. Initially there was some reduction, and that's when we were just doing the wants and warrants licensing checks on the cars. But when we brought on the ability to actually see the dispatcher's computer data, that's when we saw a real significant change in what we heard on the air.
For example, in the past you might have somebody calling back to the dispatcher to verify what the address was, or asking for a phone number for the caller, asking for driving directions ... a number of things that were available right in what the call receiver had put into the CAD system.
But in the past, you could never get that information without asking for it over the air and, in effect, needlessly tying up the voice channel.
Dan: How was coverage of the system?
John: With the old system we started off with just two sites we could get licensed. Obtaining licensing was a little bit of a trick due to the congestion. We're just across the water from the Seattle, Tacoma, and Everett area where they have larger systems. And so there's always this fight for available spectrum in channels.
At that point, we could cover about 75 percent of the county. Then over about the next five years they were able to get some licensing and as other people moved off to trunked systems and such. And so we ended up with having seven sites available in the county. We're about 37 to 38 miles long and about 10 miles wide on average on a peninsula.
And the terrain was just such that even with those seven sites and running six channels, we could only get up to about 80, maybe 85 percent coverage in the county on the old system.
Dan: Interesting. You had a number of agencies that were using the systems. Did you have any problems keeping equipment that was in use by those agencies synchronized across the agencies?
John: The problems weren't so much because of the network. We were having more problems because of separate agency funding abilities. And that's something that we set out to change when we got the technology grant, was to get us all on one synchronized path for bringing updates into the system and starting a replacement fund.
So the grant really helped us have that breather to where we could use that more for the capital expenses while we were able to offset some money to start a replacement fund and get everybody on a common platform.
The other part of the story is on the old network it was hard to keep the updates of software and the patching done. The old network really did not support much throughput, and it was on a proprietary protocol where we didn't have full IP [Internet Protocol] connectivity. And we couldn't push software updates or patches to operating systems, anti‑virus, any of that.
Of course, we weren't out on the network as far as the Internet goes, so we didn't have the need quite as much. But we found as we wanted to bring in more applications that providing updates for those applications was going to be nearly impossible on the old network.
Dan: Was that the primary drive to switch to the commercial services?
John: The primary drive, well, it's a couple of things, but the primary drive was to get more applications out to the field. And that's what this new network's allowed us to do, is really get something out there where we can connect both to the client‑server type applications and the web‑based applications, which we just couldn't consider on our previous network.
Dan: I see. Capacity, whether you're looking at it from throughput or simultaneous usage, is obviously a big difference. What sort of impact do you believe that will have on the applications you use?
John: Well we are already finding...we've had just the new network in place for basically a little less than a year, and we're already finding that people are finding new web‑based applications that they want to use in the field. Before, we were pretty much limited to accessing our CAD system in making some queries.
We really couldn't get back to our own records management system or the system that we share with the agencies around us. We have both a county shared records management, and then there's a federally sponsored one that covers the Puget Sound region and beyond. And we couldn't access those. Now we can get to those with a truly IP‑based network.
And it seems like every few months we hear of a new application. We've been able to bring in electronic ticketing and electronic collision reporting, for instance. And in the past if we'd done that we would have had to bring the laptops out of the car every day to synchronize onto our wired network at the offices, and now that can be done live in the field.
We've had some experimenting we're doing lately with license plate readers in the field. That's also something that can be carried on the network in school mapping, Critical Government Facilities Mapping. It just seems like every few months we're back to thinking about a new application that we can provide out to the field.
Dan: With the availability of common Internet protocols like TCP/IP and others like that, it seems like, any application generally that's available we would expect over our wired data networks might be available to you in the car too at this point. What sort of decisions have you had to make about the type of applications that you use? Are there any that are off limits or just not practical that you ran across so far?
John: Well, it comes to technical practicality or technical ability. We did run into a small challenge with our records management system because we found that the vendor did provide us a mobile version, a field version, of that, but they really didn't give us all the functionality that we wanted the deputies and officers to have.
For instance, they were going to have a little trouble doing some research or even seeing if we had a mug shot in our photo imagery system. So, we went out and bought another technology to basically allow us to run almost a thin client operation where we can pretty much get the screen shots from the office and from our client there. But from operational perspective what we have to limit our people to, are things basically... if an application can make an officer's job more efficient or save them time, we're trying to provide it out to the field.
However, if there was an employee that thought that they needed to be able to check on their personal email from the field, well then that's something we'd look at and scrutinize as to whether or not that would be necessary or wanted. And in most cases we filter something that we don't deem as necessary out of the system.
Dan: What kind of risk do you see in using commercial services?
John: Well, I suppose you do have the risk that you could have a vendor selected that then goes out of business or changes pricing on you. But what we've found is with most of the carriers, and we concentrated on cellular carriers, that the cellular carriers by and large were not companies that we were worried about them disappearing. And they were tied into government purchasing and rate contracts where we didn't believe that we'd have unexpected business consequences there.
Beyond that then we were looking at the technical capabilities and did we have a risk with turning over network infrastructure to a private company, risk with survivability and then down to the disaster, earthquake, large storm, things of that sort. So that's what we had to look at next.
Dan: What did you look at, at survivability, and how did that affect your choice of who you went with as a carrier?
John: When we started speaking to the providers in the area that was a key question ... what do you have in place for survivability? Do you have emergency power out at your sites? And then of course, what are your coverage areas?
And as luck would have it, perhaps not luck on their part but it was fortunate for us ... the carrier that had the most sites providing coverage to our area was the same carrier that provided backup generator and battery power for almost all of their sites. There were a couple of non‑critical sites where they didn't have it. But we thought that was a good thing and it did play into our selection, I should say.
Dan: Have you had any opportunity to consider what the impact is, or any concern you have about priority access for public safety services or lack thereof that's guaranteed to you?
John: At this point it really hasn't been that big a concern for us. Access to the system on the data side of the house has been sufficient. I think at some point, especially as more and more civilian and general business applications get put onto these networks, that we'll see that becoming a larger concern. So I would certainly hope that we see some type of priority access system in the future, but at this point it hasn't been a very large concern for us.
Dan: Has your coverage changed much with this? Do you see improved coverage?
John: We do. We found that with the cellular providers, we had probably more than double the number of sites and towers within the county as well as some that were across the water, across Puget Sound from us, that also looked into our shoreline. And so we've gone now to where I believe we're in excess of 95 percent coverage of the county for our mobile units.
Now saying that I just have to caveat that what we did in some of our outlying areas is we realized we had to put in the cellular bi‑directional amplifier and a gain antenna on the vehicle to give us coverage in a few of the tougher spots to get the RF signals in. But by and large, we're seeing a lot better coverage.
Dan: Can you talk a little bit about the difference in the equipment? I know in the city of Bremerton you're using somewhat different equipment than what you're using out about the county. Can you just describe that for us?
John: What they found in the city areas is...I'll step back a moment here. [laughs] But in the city areas there's more cell site density, and even some places where the cell sites overlap the coverage. And so you can actually get sufficient coverage in the cities, at least in this area, for the most part using the antenna right on the computer or on the AirCard itself.
Now, when you start to get out away from the business areas and the more populated areas, then we found that we really needed to add something extra to that and get the external antenna on. Because the city police will come out into the county to assist us or investigating cases and things of that sort, they went ahead and put the antennas on their vehicle. They didn't have to put the amplifiers in.
And at times, of course, we'll take a laptop out of a car and just run an internal antenna. And when you're inside the city and business areas, that really works quite well.
Dan: Let's talk a little bit about costs. Some agencies around the country that are contemplating switching from their legacy mobile data networks to commercial wireless service struggle with the thought they're going to have monthly recurring costs. For example, grants won't cover for ongoing service outside of the grant period. How did you evaluate costs of the switch overall, and ongoing costs and how to put your grant to use on this?
John: I don't have all the finance figures right in front of me but I can say in general that it seems that it'll be about $50 a month, at least we found in our area, for our AirCard fees, and that we have to compare that with our infrastructure and upkeep on the old system.
With the old system we had base stations, and at some of the tower sites there we were paying a lease fee. And we had to have technicians out to those sites. We had controllers and interface software that we were paying annual licenses on. And then we had at least $1,500 worth of data capable radio and modem installation on each of those cars.
Well, if you looked at it as a five‑year lifespan of those installations, that's $25 a month. So we were about half the cost of what we pay in the cellular fees just to maintain our own equipment, and probably a little bit larger percentage. Whereas we found with the cellular providers, in some cases they could provide, inclusive of our monthly cost, they would agree to provide the modem for us and then we were picking up the cost of amplifier and antenna.