New technology, stimulus funding help revive municipal broadband

Oct 1, 2009 10:10 AM, By Lynnette Luna

…Mark Meier, Oklahoma City's chief technology officer recently indicated that the city has derived approximately $10 million in value from its broadband network to date. "Some of our critical public safety applications required redundant wireless connectivity, but the cellular data cards have remained virtually unused and handle less than 1 percent of our traffic which has resulted in significant cost savings for the city," he says.



City departments using the network include police, fire, transit, public works and IT. And the network has more than 200 applications concurrently running over it. Devices include laptops, handheld devices, traffic controllers and video cameras. 



In most cases, public safety is the anchor-tenant of the network and other government agencies come along for the ride, Settles says. Public safety benefits the most from a variety of applications, ranging from video surveillance to web-based crime database access. …