City Of Houston Deploys Alvarion 4G Wireless Broadband Network For Advanced Municipal Services

Innovative Smart City project helps local government enhance quality of life for residents, enabling them to be safer, well-informed and consistently connected

Alvarion Ltd., the world's leading provider of 4G networks in the Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) market, recently announced the deployment of a 4G municipal network with the City of Houston. The City of Houston's Smart City project is a prime illustration of the fast-growing global movement towards transforming urban life with communications infrastructure. Alvarion's 4G wireless broadband network is enabling the City of Houston's local government to offer advanced municipal services, such as enhanced public safety and traffic optimization solutions, and consistent access to information. The Smart City project is also meeting the municipality's need for a more efficient and cost-effective management of the city's day-to-day operations.

Alvarion and the City of Houston have worked closely to design a 4G wireless broadband network that meets the city's needs. The major benefits of the new wireless broadband network indicated by the City of Houston include:

• Improving Public Service
  • Improving traffic safety and congestion throughout the city through remote control of 2500 traffic intersections and 1500 school zone flashers
  • Improving customer service and reducing cost by connecting the City's mobile AMR system to the WiMAX network to remotely monitor 500,000 water meter accounts

• Reducing Costs
  • Reducing multi-million dollar annual commercial T1 costs by replacing these connections with WiMAX service at over 500 city facilities (i.e., water/wastewater plants, maintenance, libraries, etc.)
  • Affordably expanding connectivity service to facilities and operations (i.e., SCADA, video surveillance, parking pay stations, etc.)

• Serving the Public Good
  • Making excess bandwidth available to enable free Internet service for more than 300,000 residents in underserved, underprivileged communities (i.e., public computer centers for children, where children can get free Internet access and have a safe environment to stay and learn; 20 centers are already operating today)

"We realized the most cost-effective way to introduce a city-wide network was to go with a high-performance wireless solution that offers huge savings on infrastructure expenses and can be easily and remotely managed to reduce operational costs. This way, we can gradually roll out advanced residential services, such as water utility management, in a way that would genuinely improve residential life in the city, without necessarily raising the cost of living," said Brian Anderson, Senior Consultant and Program Director, City of Houston Wireless Broadband Initiative. "We turned to Alvarion for the company's broad portfolio of 4G wireless broadband solutions, which meet the city's goals of providing wireless access to a large area of residents and for municipal use."

Alvarion's solutions are instrumental in a variety of city applications that enable significant operational advantages for the city. Through Alvarion's multi- frequency portfolio including BreezeNET B point-to-point and BreezeMAX Extreme 3650 point-to-multipoint products, the city is currently introducing traffic control in more than 3,500 locations throughout the city. City of Houston also plans to connect 400 water utility locations with the 4G network, covering an area of approximately 640 square miles.

This visionary project was further endorsed by its recognition by The National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) Board of Directors as the 2010 Community Broadband Wireless Network of the Year for extensive effort and creativity in designing and deploying a wireless network to serve institutional and public needs.

"High-performance was a major priority in selecting the solution that would best meet our current and future needs,"commented Justin Ewald, Chief Wireless Broadband Network Engineer with the City of Houston. "Alvarion's 3.65 GHz solution enables us to deploy a smaller number of base stations for increased coverage, while maintaining optimal Quality of Service throughout the network. The fact that our IT operational team now has the ability to maintain and tweak the network anytime and in line with our changing needs, from a central location, makes this a win-win situation for both our residents and our employees."

"Smart City projects are a hugely gratifying market sector for us as a technology provider. Over the years we've been following the needs of our municipal and government customers and our solutions in this field are state-of-the-art," said Eran Gorev, president and CEO of Alvarion. "We've learned how to help cities offer their residents fundamental and advanced services such as connectivity hotspots, personal security and online municipal services, while allowing them to control costs."

About Alvarion
Alvarion is a global 4G communications leader with the industry's most extensive customer base, including hundreds of commercial 4G deployments. Alvarion's industry leading network solutions for broadband wireless technologies WiMAX, TD-LTE and WiFi, enable broadband applications for service providers and enterprises covering a variety of industries such as mobile broadband, residential and business broadband, utilities, municipalities and public safety agencies. Through an open network strategy, superior IP and OFDMA know-how, and ability to deploy large scale end-to-end turnkey networks, Alvarion is delivering the true 4G broadband experience today For more information, visit www.alvarion.com

SOURCE: Alvarion Ltd.