By Naomi Graychase

May 29, 2008

Southlake, TX a suburb of Dallas/Fort Worth, is moving ahead with its plans to build a wireless crime prevention video network.

Southlake, TX a suburb of Dallas/Fort Worth, is moving ahead with its plans to build a wireless crime prevention video network.

To help improve the safety of its downtown area, the City of Southlake has begun deployment of an advanced IP video surveillance solution to increase the police force’s ability to detect, investigate, and prevent crime. Originally, planners intended to link the surveillance cameras to the City’s existing network using fiber-optic-based services, but it quickly became clear that Wi-Fi would be more economical than deploying fiber to all the necessary buildings and digging up new sidewalks and streets to lay conduit.

The City has selected Santa Clara, CA-based BridgeWave Communications’ “future proof” FE80U point-to-point wireless links to provide the backbone for its crime prevention video network. BridgeWave also recently announced municipal wireless installations in other Texas towns, including Temple, where gigabit wireless is employed for city-wide voice, video, and data traffic, and Dallas, where the Dallas Police Department uses BridgeWave’s GigE connections to backhaul IP video to a municipal mesh network.

“In sizing up the city’s various connectivity challenges and criteria, it was clear that gigabit wireless was the best alternative to fiber,” said Bryan Thompson, CEO for Redmoon in a press release today. “BridgeWave products have ultra-low latency and are by far the most stable and reliable links out there.”

The first phase of the implementation included BridgeWave’s backhaul links and 32 Sony IP video cameras. In the next phase, another 27 cameras will be added. Planners were pleased that their initial expectation of being able to acommodate up to 100 cameras on the Southlake network turned out to be low; the network has the capacity to support up to 500.

Plans are in the works to extend IP video surveillance in Southlake to public parks, as well as to public works facilities, in order to address so-called “Homeland Security” requirements in 2009.

For more on Wi-Fi in public safety and video surveillance, read “Wi-Fi Finds a Niche in Public Safety,” “Wi-Fi Protects Visitors During Super Bowl XLII,” and “Improving Security with Wi-Fi Video Surveillance.”

For more on Wi-Fi in public works, read “Wi-Fi Smart Meters,” “Wireless Sensors to Modernize Parking,” and “SmartSynch Releases Wi-Fi-enabled SmartMeters.”

Naomi Graychase is Managing Editor at Wi-FiPlanet. She has been covering technology since 1994