Stress-Free Wireless Development.

If you are a power utility or a public safety agency you have been using the same wireless data technology for decades – Narrow Band FSK, or one of its derivatives such as FFSK, or GMSK. While the rest of the world has seen orders of magnitude increases in data speeds, you have been stuck in the world of the 80’s. That is about the change, a lot. The 20 MHz wide 700 MHz public safety network in the USA and the 30 MHz wide 1800 MHz power utility band in Canad are soon rolling out. We are familiar with public safety video, having designed one of the (if not the very) first commercially available battery-powered portable wireless video surveillance systems. This was hard to do with the narrow spectrum available at the time. LTE/WiMax will bring many benefits: higher video rates, easier deployment, and fewer coverage issues. The change to a public safety infra-structure changes some key things: • Everything in the system becomes a mobile. • Everything is IP based. • Bandwidths are large (Mbps vs kbps). • Setting up a command post wireless system becomes easier. The advent of the standards-based changeable wireless modem card (Sierra Wireless, Novatel, Japser, etc.) will support deployment of upgrade-able systems. Each decision made is no longer a 20 year decision. As the technology advances your system can move with the times. So what are the negatives? • New technology always does old things in new ways, so training will be needed and resistance will occur. • Deployment is always slower than we want or expect, so there will be several years of maintaining both narrowband and broadband equipment. • It will take time to discover and simplify the key applications for this increased bandwidth. With time these new broadband technologies, will greatly enhance the value of wireless to your organizaiton.