Wireless networks mean a council's surveillance systems can be moved within hours to where they are most needed – and they save money and cut paperwork, too. William Wiles reports on a Westminster pilot scheme that's setting the trend for other authorities.
It is May 2006. Residents of an estate in Westminster, central London, have complained that a vacant property has been squatted. Drug dealing and antisocial behaviour have followed. Last night, the council clamped a mobile CCTV camera to a wall opposite the squat and, this morning, housing officers and police are monitoring its pictures from a temporary command centre above a shop around the corner.

On the high-resolution colour screens, they see drugs change hands outside the house and officers swoop. Arrests are made and the squat is broken up. By the next day, the camera and command centre are gone.

Meanwhile, on another part of the estate, a social worker is doing her rounds. She's just looked in on a client, and is filing her report on the spot using her personal digital assistant. She doesn't need to go back to the office to do this, so she has time to check on an elderly tenant a few doors down. She doesn't have to bother the tenant, she just uses her PDA to tap into the heat and movement sensors in the flat. Again, the report can be filed while she's on her way.

Further down the street, she passes a pub that, according to some residents, has started to play loud music late at night without a licence. The council had a noise meter attached to a nearby lamp-post this morning; when the music starts thumping that night, a real-time display in a council office shows the decibel levels. By the next morning, it has enough evidence to act.

Welcome to the wireless city, Westminster council's vision of its services in the very near future. And if it sounds like expensive, over-complex gimmickry, think again: it's not only within the reach of most councils, but very soon it might be more costly not to have a wireless network.

A wireless network is pretty much as it sounds: a network of computers like you might have in an office, but minus the metres of cabling. Instead, information flows through the air like a mobile phone signal.

The huge advantage is mobility. If you have a laptop or a PDA capable of linking to the network, it can do so anywhere within the network's "airspace" – be it a bar, a street or the middle of a park.

That means work can be filed, records can be checked and information can be accessed from anywhere within the wireless zone, without having to return to the office.

At the moment, Westminster's wire-free area consists of a tiny patch of Soho in London's West End. This area is covered by four wireless CCTV cameras and a noise meter, all linked to the council network, which was set up with computer chip company Intel, networking specialist Cisco Systems and mobile network specialists Skynet and Tel Indus.

This particular patch was chosen for a good reason: it has high crime levels and it is a particularly complicated area to use such a network. Narrow 19th-century streets are not the best place to use wireless signals and it is a business area where the companies are mostly involved in the media, so there is a lot of other information travelling through the air that might cause interference.

"If it works within Westminster, the most complex, demanding and difficult city to run wireless through, it can work anywhere," says Peter Rogers, the council's chief executive.

If it works here, the most complex and difficult city to run wireless through, it can work anywhere

Peter Rogers, Westminster Council

The output of the cameras and the meter can be checked using mobile devices anywhere within the zone as well as back at the council's headquarters. That means CCTV footage is no longer tied to a central control room; a police officer can watch criminal activity as it happens, from out of sight around a corner. The CCTV images are high enough resolution to be used in court.

Already, drug dealers have been arrested thanks to the tiny pilot network and it has also made strides in tackling illegal street traders, fly posting and people putting cards advertising prostitutes in public telephone boxes.

The system itself is mobile. "The technology can be moved in a matter of hours," says Andrew Snellgrove, network manager for Westminster. "Mobile command centres can be set up in hours, fully networked."

"It's our 'Martini solution'," says Rogers. "Any time, anyplace, anywhere."

Cheaper and better
All very useful, you may be thinking, but what about the cost? Well, this is where wireless networks suddenly become extremely interesting to finance directors: compared to the alternatives, they are very cheap. For instance, Westminster spent £1.2m on the 33 conventional CCTV cameras it has in Soho, meaning they average out at about £40,000 each. By contrast, wireless cameras cost less than £8000 each – in part because they don't need wiring in. "Five for one seemed like good economics to us," says Rogers.

Meanwhile, the ability to do paperwork on the hoof means efficiency and mileage savings galore. "It really does hit the government's buttons of more for less," says Rogers. These efficiency savings were the holy grail for the consultants who set up the system – the key was not just doing the same thing differently, but doing something new and better. "We don't just want to stick lipstick on the bulldog," says Tim Hearn, local government manager for Cisco Systems.

Thanks to the success of the pilot, the government has given Westminster £500,000 to extend the scheme across the whole of Soho. And arm's-length management organisation Citywest Homes is investing in the system so its estates can be covered, too.

The focus will be on crime and antisocial behaviour at first but the council is looking at ways to expand the system to take in housing, health, social care and much more. In the near future, housing officers and social services will be linked up to the network and it's also proposed that the network could be used to make home and foreign-language education possible for local schools.

Westminster's zeal for the wireless city seems to be contagious. Representatives from several other councils, including West Thurrock and Waltham Forest, put in an appearance at the scheme's official launch last Thursday.

Source

Housing Today