IPWireless today announced the first deployments in North America of its UMTS mobile broadband network technology, which has been designed for both the public safety and commercial service provider frequency bands around 700MHz, and provides a seamless upgrade path to LTE. Using the IPWireless 700MHz solution, Southern Georgia Regional Information Technology Authority (SGRITA) and USA Choice Internet Services Company, a provider of Internet services to the underserved economic areas in Northwest and Central Pennsylvania, are both moving forward with their deployments to offer mobile broadband services to both consumers and local public safety agencies. It was announced earlier that T-Mobile Germany is also piloting the IPWireless 700MHz solution in the rural area in north Brandenburg near Wittstock/Dosse.
SGRITA's network will cover 2,000 square miles, and will serve the Southwest Georgia farming community, including schools, residents, and government agencies including police, fire, and EMS public safety agencies. SGRITA is deploying its mobile broadband network in conjunction with Civitium, a consulting firm that provides business, technology and public policy services to local governments, state agencies and high-technology industry leaders.
"We have been trialling IPWireless' solution over the past few months and have been extremely impressed with the results to date," said Dustin Springman, Director Network Operations, at SGRITA. "The pre-LTE system is based on proven hardware and software, provides the best-in-class mobility performance we require and allows us to easily roam between 2.5 GHz in more urban areas to 700MHz in the deep southern Georgia forest areas. Based on these benefits we have decided to trial the 700MHz solution for our public safety agencies as well."
USA Choice is deploying a multi-service communications network, offering fixed and mobile applications for public safety, mobile data and voice capabilities as well as video surveillance services. The network will consist of 49 sites within the counties of Crawford, Forest, Venango, and Warren Pennsylvania. "It's clear that the market is leaning towards LTE as its technology of choice. IPWireless provides the performance and technology advantages our public safety and commercial constituents require, and allows us to deploy a proven pre-LTE solution today," said Brian Fielding, President, at USA Choice.
"IPWireless has spent the past decade pioneering mobile broadband solutions that follow 3GPP standards," said Dr. Bill Jones, CEO of IPWireless. "This standards-based approach has earned us the trust of tier-1 customers including New York City, T-Mobile and Orange. Building on this knowledge and the proven performance of these networks we are now delivering a best-in-class solution for deployments in the 700MHz band as well."
The IPWireless mobile broadband solution is based on 3GPP standards, and enables public safety agencies and service providers to upgrade seamlessly to LTE when they are ready. IPWireless offers a set of end user devices that include a USB modem and a PCI Express Mini Card (PEM) that can integrate into a range of devices including; residential home gateways, outdoor CPE, rugged mobile routers for vehicle installation, rugged PDAs and ultra-mobile PCs, traffic light controllers and video surveillance cameras for enhanced public safety mobile computing.
IPWireless' 700MHz solution is similar to the company's technology that has already been used by the city of New York for its multi-agency wireless network (NYCWiN). IPWireless' UMTS-based solution allows radio traffic to be prioritized by type of user as well as type of application; thereby ensuring the system always allows service to the highest priority users such as government officials or emergency response personnel. The technology supports an additional set of features, including support for single frequency networks, Macro Diversity Combining, 64QAM, intercell interference cancellation and code reuse MIMO for optimal network performance.
The technology delivers a peak throughput of 21Mb/s per sector, and in each 5+5MHz license in the 700MHz band. The same equipment can also operate in 10+10MHz, for example in the combined public safety allocation and D block, delivering over 42Mb/s peak. For demanding video surveillance applications, the solution can support over 9Mb/s on the uplink.
Nick Anderson, Technical Manager for Standards at IP Wireless will be giving a presentation at the forthcoming LTE Focus one-day conference in Amsterdam on 10 September 2009.
