Three fire command vehicles and 24 police cars are already connected to the mesh network, which includes 450 mesh wireless routers from Motorola Inc., Providence CIO Charlie Hewitt said in an interview.

As many as 100 to 200 vehicles will eventually be connected, offering quick access to online records on criminal suspects, as well as mug shots and even building blueprints, Hewitt said. The system can support video transmissions but has not yet been enabled to do that. A separate wireless network is used for voice communications, partly to add redundancy in case of an emergency, he said.

The city plans to expand the network for use by public works and other municipal employees, including building inspectors, in the next year or so. There are no plans to use the network for a public wireless system, although a separate nonprofit group is working on a statewide wireless network for economic development purposes, Hewitt said.

Police and fire users have a rugged 15-in. monitor in each of their vehicles that can be used to access city records or for Web browsing, if needed. The underlying network is not Wi-Fi wireless, although it still operates in the 2.4-GHz wireless band, Hewitt said. Motorola refers to the technology as Mesh Network Architecture, and Providence chose it for its ability to provide dynamic routing should a wireless router become disabled. For example, if a car knocks down a pole holding a wireless router, the system can use the next closest router to forward a data stream.

Providence issued a request for proposals more than a year ago, but Motorola was the only vendor to bid on a network that the city could run privately. The system was bought with money from a series of federal grants, including funds from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, according to a statement from Mayor David Cicilline.