Dallas Police Keep Eye on Crime With Wireless Network

The Dallas Police Department is deploying video-surveillance equipment to keep closer tabs on activity in the city's downtown area, leveraging a wireless mesh network to deliver live camera feeds.

The project employs a wireless mesh network that uses 4.9-GHz public-safety airwaves. The network includes 40 IP video cameras from Sony, 35 multiradio mesh network nodes from Firetide and seven high-capacity, Gigabit Ethernet and 100-Mbps backbone links from BridgeWave Communications. The long-range BridgeWave wireless links tie the mesh network to monitoring stations at city hall and the police department. The cameras can clearly capture images as small as a license plate from 300 yards and can be operated remotely by the police.

The Dallas Police Department said it can track activity in 30 percent of the downtown area through live camera feeds delivered to the City Hall offices and police headquarters. A spokesperson for the department said the wireless mesh network appealed to them in large part because it let them use existing equipment and bring the network online quickly.BearCom, the Dallas-based wireless integrator that installed the network, said that the wireless mesh technology was also moderately priced and very reliable, so that even in the event a wireless link fails or a node loses power, the video feed will still reach its destination.

Network Computing recently detailed a similar effort at video surveillance by the Chicago Transit Authority.