LA Cops get Wi-Fi Drive By Access

An anonymous reader writes " A PC World.com article: "the Los Angeles Police Department plans to install 27 wireless local area networks (WLANs) at police stations throughout the city in the next three months, according to Roger Ham, deputy chief for communications at the LAPD. Ham says he plans to equip police cars with handheld computers from Symbol Technologies. The handheld devices will be equipped with 802.11b WLAN cards that communicate in the unlicensed 2.4-GHz band with access points installed in police stations at a raw data rate of 11 megabits per second-far faster than the 19.2-kilobits-per-second throughput in the department's 800-MHz wide area network (WAN) installed by Motorola two years ago and covering the city. Will Strauss, an analyst at Forward Concepts, called Ham's plan "a cheap way to get bandwidth" that would allow LAPD units to periodically pick up high-bandwidth data as they pass by police stations equipped with WLAN systems."

Comments

Re:Security of their network?

[spanky1]

Some 802.11 implementations are very secure. Cisco, for example, doesn't use a static WEP key like home 802.11 equipment. The only wireless equipment I would trust with sensitive data is made by Cisco. For home use though I buy the cheap stuff and use 128-bit WEP with MAC filtering.

NJSP has had similar tech for years

[LinuxHam]

I consulted on a deal to help NJSP patch the Win98 laptops installed in their cruisers. Apparently they too have a 19.2k link statewide, but have a higher bandwidth microwave link available when the cars are very close to the station houses. We built routines to pull down packages by ftp over the microwave link when they turned on the car and booted the laptop.

Re:802.11b now ... but 802.11g in the future

[mshultz]

...can't they just upgrade their equipment when 11g gets stable instead of having to use up other parts of the spectrum?

From what I've read, 802.11g becomes significantly less reliable than the b variety at the same ranges. In other words, range here might be a more critical concern than throughput. Just a guess...

Re:Must be fun... [OT]

[bobKali]

Robert X. Cringley suggested that a while back. Seems like a good idea...but I'm just a little apprehensive about cars with more distractions in them. I'm already seeing an increasing number of cars with LCD TV screens on dashboards. I've even seen a few (ok, 2) people driving around watching pornos on them (I assUme they weren't driving stickshifts - but I didn't try to get a look in to verify that.)

I can just see those "Hang up and drive" bumper stickers being replaced with "Quit surfing and drive" stickers.