Today, Public Safety networks need to support a growing range of customers, applications, and services. Along with the increasing amount of mission-critical traffic to support public health and emergency responses, most agencies are also supporting traffic involving other agencies, consolidating inter-, intra-, and adjacent agency traffic over a common infrastructure.
Read MoreThe American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) of 2021 allocates $350 billion to help states, counties, cities, and tribal governments improve their capabilities, infrastructure, and services to better respond to and manage the pandemic. This represents a unique opportunity not only to improve strained backhaul networks for public safety agencies but also to support the advent of 5G and a raft of new public safety applications.
Read MoreAs many readers are aware, the FCC issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) regarding RLAN operation within the 6 GHz bands. Over the last two and a half years, the FWCC has dedicated itself to protecting fixed links from t in these bands. Understandably so, this is especially important given the diversity of fixed link users in the 6 GHz bands; among others, utility companies, oil and gas companies, and local government agencies, including those dealing with public safety, have large numbers of 6 GHz links that perform unique and crucial tasks. There are approximately 97,000 fixed links in the 6 GHz bands.
Read MoreThe evolution of applications, services and demands on private broadband networks are creating new requirements for coverage and agility, which will require a new breed of transport for backhaul. The backhaul network must be smarter, simpler and more cost effective to be able to handle the challenge of connecting any device, anywhere.
Read MoreWhile public safety networks have much in common, each agency experiences a unique set of challenges in two areas: financing periodic system-wide upgrades and keeping their networks running optimally over the life of the network. One challenge they all share is securing big-dollar funding to avoid obsolescence while continuing to provide advanced services to their operational and emergency agencies.
Read MoreRandy Jenkins, Aviat Networks’ Director of Business Development for North America, attended the “5G Transport & the Edge” meeting of technology leaders in New York on October 10. He sat on the microwave transport in the 5G environment panel, titled “Redefining the Access Network: Examining RAN Architecture & the Implications for 5G Transport.”
Read MoreThings at the Boston Marathon Finish Line in 1910 were much calmer—and simpler—than the 2013 edition sans cell phones and other wireless devices. Author: Unknown. (Image credit: Wikipedia).
As was demonstrated by the tragic events in Boston April 2013, cell phone networks cannot accommodate every potential caller or texter using a mobile access device in times of peak load usage—such as during a crisis occurring in real-time on television and social media. Erroneously, some pundits at the time ascribed the outage to a co-conspiracy to take down the public wireless networks. Or an action by the civil authorities to thwart additional remote control saboteurs as has happened in Spain and other places. However, the simple truth is that demand far outstripped capacity for a time in Massachusetts due to the fact that mobile phone networks are designed to function with a typical level of subscriber activity—calls, text, mobile web, etc. When virtually everyone in the vicinity of the finishline of the Boston Marathon unlocked their iPhone or Samsung Galaxy smartphone and started to communicate the unfolding story to the outside world, it came as no surprise to network designers at the mobile operators that the infrastructure slowed to a crawl then ceased to work for a time. But this was news to the general public.
Read MorePublic Safety networks are changing and becoming more advanced in terms of applications and services that are required by its users. Networks that were initially deployed to carry low capacity voice circuits are now faced with the challenges of being increasingly adaptive, elastic and intelligent to accommodate the constantly evolving traffic it carries.
Read MoreIn PART 1 of this blog, we provided an analysis of utility applications and expected capacity demands. Applications, especially security and surveillance, are rapidly increasing capacity requirements for utility networks. In this blog, we will outline an approach for performing capacity planning for a sample utility network in light of the applications traffic requirements.
Read MoreFor many, Labor Day marks the end of summer vacations and children heading back to school. But this time of the year also includes potential severe weather threats for many states in the South and along the east coast of the United States.
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