Peter Orne Broadband Wireless Communities Blog

Cambria County: AllCoNet's Pennsylvania Cousin Rolls Out

The public-safety communication network in rural Cambria County (pop. 152,000), in western Pennsylvania, dates back to the 1970s. In April, county commissioners announced that they would build a $10-million countywide wireless network to bring this infrastructure into compliance with an FCC mandate—and bring Cambria County into the 21^st century.

The carrier-class network provided by CONXX is inspired by the success of AllCoNet 2 in nearby Allegany County, Maryland. Cambria’s network will rest on 14 towers over 700 square miles—including Wi-Fi over 30 square miles using Wavion equipment—and will not only serve emergency personnel and county government but schools, local institutions, and the commercial and residential markets with a full range of applications and services.

In an interview, Brian Feist, Cambria County’s Director of Emergency Services, and Todd Tanner, Executive Vice President at CONXX, reflected on the project’s origins and the past two years of intensive planning and preparation. They will appear on the “Public-Private Partnerships” panel at the Digital Cities Convention in Chicago, May 22–23, 2007.

W2i: Brian, your county is similar to many rural areas in the U.S. that have seen better economic times. What’s Cambria’s story?

Brian Feist: Cambria County is a very old county that grew up in America’s industrial revolution, through coal mining and steel mills, and these industries have taken a major hit. Local government here can’t draw in tax dollars, and our public safety suffers. We’re using low-band 33 Mhz for fire and emergency response. Public safety uses high-band technology put into effect in the mid-to-late 1970s. Our towers are linked by 2 Ghz microwave radio, but these are all being reallocated to the cellular telephone industry. We are on a provisional license and have to be off that by the end of 2007. We can’t buy the equipment to upkeep or repair our existing network.

W2i: What is the scope of the agencies the new network will serve?

Feist: There are 47 fire departments—all but one are volunteer—33 police departments, and 23 ambulance services. Pennsylvania is a true commonwealth, so I’ve got 62 individual communities, and then the county government. With the new network, we’re talking about a major savings for government. Public safety gets to use all the benefits of the network for free. Fire stations will have Internet access, bringing the ability to do training and teleconferencing. Our emergency personnel will have capabilities like they’ve never had before.

W2i: How did your decision to work with CONXX originate?

Brian Feist: Jack Fox, a program manager at FEMA, took me to see CONXX’s AllCoNet in Allegany County, Maryland, where the focus has been on economic development. There’s only one county between mine and theirs, and both have seen similar hardships economically. The local carriers aren’t able to provide a solution. So I sold our network as a win-win for everyone—public safety and economic development together. The county commissioners said: go ahead and do the research.

W2i: Was there an RFP process?

Brian Feist: We saw the success of Allegany County, and CONXX took us under their wing with the entire system. Instead of going with an RFP, we’re doing a government lease on the entire project designed exactly to what we want. CONXX has been able to facilitate the financing.

Todd Tanner, CONXX: We asked Johnson Control, and M&T Bank came in with a great rate for the county.

W2i: What’s the network going to look like when it’s deployed?

Tanner: It’s a multiservice network with 14 towers total. There are at least two licensed radios on each tower, and on those we use 4 STM-1's and mix three of them into an OC-12 SONET ATM interface and take the other bandwidth directly into SONET for traditional T1 and DS3 services. We use the new ATM PNNI for the carrier grade routing and reliability, essential for public safety and heavy commercial applications. That’s the actual core network, and that’s engineered to run at six “9’s”. That’s the core, and we layer on top of that all the different applications necessary to operate the County. The “EtherCell” interface at each tower will be capable of 60 billion packets per second.

Cambria will have a wireless mobile network built on a 900 Mhz GFSK (GSM like) with AES 128 encryption that allows them to cruise throughout the county with full connectivity. At a school, fire department, or government facility, they’ll use a 5.8 GHz WiMAX-type technology.

In the populated areas—such as Ebensburg and Johnstown—the Wavion radios are attached to the core network and Wi-Fi will be available in those areas. Wavion has done a great job for us. And politically it was very important to the commissioners, for all the citizens to be able to access broadband cost-effectively.

Feist: The commissioners saw that the savings on T1 and long-distance telephone service was such that in year three the county can begin using this to generate revenue. And the system will continue to pay for itself.

Tanner: Because of the core network architecture being deployed by Cambria, the 4.9 GHz licensed public safety applications will layer seamlessly onto the network. When the proposed 700-Mhz licensed public safety band is released, Brian doesn’t have to develop a backhaul system, it’s up and running, and it will be inexpensive for him to deploy the new applications that will be mandated. So he basically has his own carrier grade network. As for managing the network, we’ll provide the operations for the first two years but we work for the county at the county’s grace.

W2i: What was your experience with Pennsylvania’s Act 183, which prohibits local governments from building their own telecommunication infrastructures?

Feist: In Pennsylvania, Verizon has the right of refusal for any wireless project.

Tanner: The County went through the actual law, gave Verizon 60 days, and they responded that they wouldn’t do it.

Feist: After that, it was easy bringing our various agencies on board. We were using some of their tower sites, and we are used to building tower agreements with many of the municipalities. It also included an education process for the Chamber of Commerce, the schools, and so on.

W2i: What are the applications you want to run?

Tanner: Brian’s already initiated automated meter reading (AMR), and the water companies will use the network as the backbone. We’re doing it in Cumberland, Maryland, today. The Wi-Fi network was relatively inexpensive to layer onto the AllCoNet2 network. It’s easy to add the Wavion APs without a huge cost, and their reach is so good we can go in with less than half the nodes typically required. We expect to deploy lots of SCADA, lots of telemetry.

Because of the core multiservice network, Brian will be able to do simulcast across the county. Cameras are very easy to deploy—not just PC-style cameras, but standard and high-definition full-motion cameras.

Feist: The commercial service is similar to putting a public water or highway system in, and the plan is to lease to ISPs to go out and provide bandwidth to the public. We’re encouraging job growth and competition to bring the prices down. We have a few local ISPs that are very interested already.

W2i: What’s your final project timeline?

Feist: We’ve been doing this for two years nonstop, and everything has to be running no later than December 31, 2007. We hope to be up and testing by October 1. We’ve built a strong partnership, and everybody’s excited.

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