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Applications for Municipalities |
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Cost-effective Communications Infrastructure
Municipal IT managers are constantly searching for ways to drive down budgetary expenditure while increasing city-wide communications capabilities. The Metro Grid™ from Clear Mesh Networks enables municipalities to connect city assets with high speed, high capacity infrastructure and replace costly T1s and other leased lines. The Metro Grid turns a single fiber-fed municipal building into a central POP that can distribute up to 100 Mbps of Ethernet bandwidth to surrounding municipal buildings without the need to trench fiber.
For less than $5000 per city asset, you can deliver a secure, open standards-based and interoperable LAN transport service that supports open standards-based service management tools such as virtual LANs (VLANs), multiple spanning tree (MSTP) instances and class-of-service (CoS) capabilities. Connect administrative buildings, schools, police/fire stations, and community centers faster, cheaper, and easier than ever before.
Municipal Wi-Fi Deployments
With the Internet growing ever more vital to productivity and communication, high-speed access has joined water, power, cable and phone service on checklists for canvassing corporate sites, universities, and central metropolitan areas. But, despite the cooperative spirits of city governments and wireless and Internet providers, the deployment models for "free, ubiquitous, high-speed" has yet to keep up with bandwidth requirements, quality of service and an ROI that will keep these initiatives viable for the long-run.
Offsetting the exorbitant costs of fiber and the instability of Wi-Fi mesh networks, the Metro Grid model integrates with and supplements a city's existing fiber and Wi-Fi infrastructures to cost-effectively link sites, speed expansion, increase capacity and ensure quality. The Metro Grid blends the best of wireless, affordable reach, with the best of optics, superior quality. A mesh of low-cost rooftop nodes, the grid lets service providers extend connectivity from a single building accessed by fiber or Wi-Fi throughout a city with upfront investment below $5,000 per building.
To help achieve payback in less than one year, the Metro Grid model allows cities and service providers far greater flexibility in targeting and equipping a broader range of users with better, more affordable connectivity:
Single-tenant small businesses (SMB): Single-tenant commercial buildings with a T1-level customer today pay about $500 per month for Internet access. Bundled broadband business services can be offered to such customers at far lower costs via the Metro Grid, with the same SLAs and the prospect of adding VoIP-based telephony.
Campus environments: Buildings throughout universities, medical centers, government complexes and the like can be linked by affordable multimedia Virtual LANs (VLANs) and VPNs capable of supporting multimedia applications, secure file transfer and thousands of users.
Residential apartment buildings: Service providers can extend broadband services with guaranteed performance to lower income areas and achieve payback in less than a year even with only a handful of tenants subscribing to bundled IP voice and Internet access services.
Overcoming the chief hurdles to city-wide wireless access – cost, logistics and quality – the Metro Grid strikes a viable balance for the first time between cities, providers and public need. The cost structure of free service improves by orders of magnitude while providers gain the flexibility to actually grow revenues by offering premium services.
Disaster Recovery
Whether it's a much publicized hurricane, a rare tsunami, an unusually large earthquake or a simple accident by a construction worker, municipal IT managers have been given the daunting task of creating viable disaster recovery plans that keep municipal communications up and running during, or immediately following, a natural disaster or accident.
Using the ClearMesh Metro Grid, municipalities can create a secondary fiber-grade network that acts as a backup to its traditional network. For the one-time charge of approximately $5,000 per building, any city asset can have immediate failover if traditional fiber, T1 or DSL services are interrupted.
In the event of a major natural disaster, ClearMesh nodes can be immediately rolled out to create a city-wide canvas of a 100 Mgps "fiber ring" throughout a metropolitan area. By placing nodes on rooftops, light poles or even mounting them on trucks, the nodes create a mesh infrastructure that can tie in hundreds of Wi-Fi access points, surveillance cameras or VoIP switches. When a city is in chaos, ClearMesh provides the communications infrastructure that public safety officials can count on.
Video Surveillance
Light poles, intersections, port authorities and points of entry, municipal complexes, and supplemental police patrol in high crime rate areas are all environments that are begging for increased monitoring for criminal or nefarious activity. For federal and state government agencies, security tends to command a larger percentage of annual spending while municipal governments are often straining to strike a viable balance between the cost and quality of communication – sometimes a daunting deterrent.
While judicial use of captured video is requiring higher resolution and high-priority video traffic is increasingly straining existing T1 or WAN infrastructures, the Metro Grid makes wireless video surveillance viable in campus and geographically dispersed private networks. It's the only wireless mesh solution on the market today capable of aggregating IPTV video streams from hundreds of video cameras with real-time quality. This new wireless optical mesh model slashes costs, speeds buildouts, increases capacity and supports a host of high-speed applications.
Temporary Municipal Infrastructure
The United States recently celebrated its 300 millionth resident. Although the little ones won't be asking for Internet access for the next couple of years, the continued population growth in the United States is constantly putting pressure on federal, state and local governments to keep up with housing and infrastructure requirements. For cities, especially in the mid- and southwest, explosions in population and the need for high-capacity bandwidth have left city planners at the mercy of telecommunications companies that are often over-burdened themselves to deliver communications infrastructure.
With the ClearMesh Metro Grid, municipalities can deploy fiber-grade services to new construction zones by connecting to neighboring fiber and transmitting via a wireless optical mesh. Best of all, a wireless infrastructure eliminates concerns over hitting fiber during construction, and can be redeployed to other areas once construction is complete and fiber has been laid in to the area.
Immediate Communications Infrastructure
Smaller rural towns are often bypassed or underserved by traditional service providers. By connecting to a single point of a high speed network, the ClearMesh Metro Grid can easily extend a high-capacity, high-density network throughout the city. Mount nodes throughout the city on light poles and build a high-speed communications infrastructure without the costs and time of burying cable.
A Metro Grid can deliver wireless fiber-grade service to public buildings including city halls, police and fire stations, schools and community centers. Communities implementing the wireless optical mesh encourage rapid economic development by easily extending this pay-as-you-grow, fiber-quality service to new buildings and developments. If municipalities prefer not to be responsible for managing and maintaining a city-wide communications infrastructure, CLECs and wireless ISPs can lease bandwidth on the same network that delivers municipal communications. Such arrangements can often pay for the cost of initial installation and continued maintenance.
