The county, with a population of 2.2 million that includes Detroit, began its journey to link different radios, cell phones, laptops and data handhelds more than two years ago. For the past 18 months, it has been adding functionality to software provided by Codespear LLC, said Mark Hammond, deputy director of the county's Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, in a recent interview.
The system provides both interoperability and alert notification to business and residents, and will soon be expanded to take alerts from the many chemical plants in the area, he said.
So far, the county has spent about US$750,000 in grant funds on the technology. It's money well-spent, considering how long the federal umbrella effort known as Safecom is expected to take, Hammond said. "Compared to the federal Safecom program, which will take $256 billion through 2017, this is technology here now and gives us an interoperability fix now," he said.
"The Achilles' heel of emergency management is lack of interoperability," Hammond said. Since the beginning of the use of radio communications by police and fire and other first responders, hundreds of lives and untold dollars in damage to property can be attributed to slow responses because of communications problems, he said.
But with the system in place today in Wayne County, residents are already alerted on wire-line or cell phones about coming tornadoes and other emergencies. Also, first responders have sent back photos of a fire scene from their personal cell phones to be distributed to various jurisdictions to help fire commanders decide whether to send more help, Hammond said.
One especially useful part of the system is that Wayne County can alert various jurisdictions quickly and securely when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security raises its security threat rating, so that jurisdictions know to lock doors and add guards to power plants and water supplies, Hammond said. Before, the various jurisdictions were not always sure the change in the threat rating was legitimate.
Similar capabilities will be possible for chemical plants in a coming phase, he said. He estimated that there are 115 such plants in Wayne County outside Detroit and more than 200 in Detroit.
Hammond is also using the system to operate videoconferences with Wayne County's leaders.
Codespear's system is based on a common Internet Protocol infrastructure, with a small radio-interface adapter at each emergency management center or temporary location that is connected to various radios and devices in use, Hammond and Codespear officials said. The adapter is only 1 by 4 by 6 inches in size and costs in the low thousands of dollars, about the cost of a single 800-MHz ruggedized radio that is carried by an emergency responder, said Gregg Rowland, vice president of marketing at Codespear. About 25 adapters are being used in Wayne County.
Birmingham, Mich.-based Codespear also provides a PC-based user interface based on its SmartMSG server that can be connected to the Global Positioning System to locate units responding to an emergency.
Rowland said Codespear is probably the first working interoperability system in the country, while several major vendors such as Cisco Systems Inc. are only conducting or announcing trials.
The biggest difference between Codespear's system and Cisco's IP Interoperability and Collaboration System (IPICS), announced in October, is that Codespear's is primarily software, while Cisco's system relies on multiple hardware and software components, said Sean Buckley, an analyst at Current Analysis Inc. in Sterling, Va. Other vendors in the market include traditional radio companies such as Motorola Inc. and M/A-Com Inc. An interoperability gateway is being developed by Raytheon JPS Communications , a subsidiary of Raytheon Co. Also, Lucent Technologies Inc. announced a trial in Phoenix in October with Aloha Partners LP .
In addition, Codespear faces traditional government systems integrators, such as Lockheed Martin Corp. , Northrop Grumman Corp. , General Dynamics Corp. , Computer Sciences Corp. and Science Applications International Corp. , all which have indicated they will provide homeland security, public safety-related initiatives, Buckley said.
With the government allocating the 4.9-GHz band for public safety and with plans to allocate the upper part of the 700-MHz band, there will be "plenty of opportunity" for interoperability vendors to bring out products, Buckley said. "In the wake of events such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, the drive for communications interoperability for first responders is a market that's on the move," Buckley added.
He said one vendor is not likely to dominate. As a start-up, Codespear "lacks the resources" of a large vendor or integrator and will likely need to partner with one for further growth, he added.
Hammond said Codespear's technology "was a clinker, way ahead of its time," back in mid-2003 when he first saw the product at a trade show. "But now the technology has caught up with the need, and it's the most dynamic software program I've ever had," Hammond said.