Bill Parslow, Head of ICT & eGovernment, Brighton & Hove City Council on its investigation into WiMAX to build a wireless broadband 'Metranet' to bring internet connectivity to schools whilst laying the foundations for mobilising workers in the future.
Brighton is lucky to have a thriving new media scene which, in certain segments such as e-learning, matches London in the size of the contracts it wins. Creative industries make up one in five of all businesses in the city and employ approximately 10 per cent of the work-force.
Its youthful demographic means it has a higher than average early-adopter profile in terms of new technology and the city’s take-up of wireless internet, or Wi-Fi, that began in early 2003, is a classic example of this.
Led by the www.looseconnection.com project, nobody in Brighton is ever further than 10 minutes from a free wireless broadband hotspot and, perhaps because it is free to the citizen, it has proved to be a very popular service with small business and students alike.
Indeed, the free Wi-Fi culture which permeates the city has served a real economic function allowing free and easy access to the internet for mobile workers across the city. Go into almost any wireless pub or café in Brighton and you will see at least one or two with laptops fired up amidst the cups and glasses.
This early experience with Wi-Fi lead to a joint investigation with local company Metranet Communications as to the feasibility of using wireless protocols to solve key issues of connectivity to council properties, in particular primary schools, in areas difficult or prohibitively expensive to reach with conventional broadband technologies. This required a radical solution. Wi-Fi however was not the answer.
We required a radical solution - Wi-Fi however was not the answer
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Whilst there are clear benefits to its use, perhaps for small community mesh networks, 802.11b or g neither had the range nor the security levels that made us feel comfortable with sending potentially sensitive information over the airwaves. 2.4GHz, the frequency used for Wi-Fi, is also particularly sensitive to the odd coastal sea mist that occasionally rumbles in soaking up Wi-Fi signal strength. Metranet’s proposals on the early WiMAX technology however were a different matter and we have interrogated these specifications as they have evolved over the last two years.
Many advances have been made on the network security front and in Brighton we have taken a two tier approach. Firstly, the system hardware encodes at “layer 1”, the ether, with a process akin to radio scrambling. Secondly, Metranet Communications consulted on producing our own configurations for VPN (Virtual Private Network). Thus data is moved safely from one point to another. We feel these are appropriate measures taken by a responsible local authority to counter the level of threat to network security. Naturally, we will keep this under review as technology marches on.
The net result of this work was the creation of the Brighton Metranet (or Metropolitan Intranet), a massive wireless broadband infrastructure based on the WiMAX standard that covers the whole city. We used WiMAX as it outperforms Wi-Fi considerably in both range and bandwidth. Whereas well-installed Wi-Fi might have a range of 50m in reality, the Brighton Metranet’s longest link at the moment is 7.5km. This link alone provides 24mbps of uncontended bandwidth and marks the first technical collaboration between Brighton & Hove City Council and the University of Sussex as the link terminates with the University’s infrastructure on the roof of the Arts Faculty. We hope this will allow for future collaborations such as the InSTEP project which uses video conferencing over the system for teacher training in realtime.
The initial pilot involved seven schools and three University sites. This allowed Metranet to lease the rooftop of the tallest building in Brighton, securing the support of the Residents’ Association of Sussex Heights and building their main access point 140m in free air. Having such a high central re-distribution point above Brighton allows for the benefits of line-of-sight which is essentially longer range. However, one of the main strategic advantages of WiMAX is its non-line-of-sight (NLOS) capability. It is this leap forward in long-range wireless technology, the ability to receive a WiMAX signal without being able to directly see the access point, which makes it particularly interesting. Because WiMAX relies on multiple paths it benefits from reflections off buildings etc whereas previously this would be considered to be “noise” hampering the signal. Current calculations for NLOS WiMAX in Brighton allows for a radius up to 3.5km.
We feel the Brighton Metranet provides a solid working case study for all local authorities to reference
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Implementing the Brighton Metranet has not only saved the people of Brighton & Hove a considerable amount of money but also offered the potential for the strategic ability to connect mobile workers to the Council’s infrastructure in the future. Whilst solving the immediate issues of internet connectivity to primary schools in Brighton, we have laid the foundations for using WiMAX to distribute data to field workers within the city and at a much lower cost than 3G.
This strategy is very much connected with the chip manufacturers’ product roadmap. As Rose Luckin, Pro-Vice Chancellor, University of Sussex, says, “Intel’s development of the Centrino processor has been critical to the Wi-Fi strategy adopted by The University of Sussex. We are now looking forward to working with Intel during the formation of the WiMAX standard using the Rosedale processor and the Brighton Metranet as a case study.” Intel’s commitment to the WiMAX standard has been integral to our decision-making process and we hope the Brighton Metranet will be one of the UK’s testbeds for Intel’s Rosedale silicon. Rosedale will enable WiMAX devices small enough to use for roaming connectivity allowing for VoIP (Voice Over IP) and delivering data to field operatives such as social workers, doctors, traffic wardens etc, as and when the 802.16e standard arrives, to increase the efficiency of our workforce. We are also keen to investigate other opportunities such as alarm systems for the elderly and city-wide translation services.
We feel the Brighton Metranet provides a solid working case study for all local authorities to reference. Local authorities across Europe are presented with an exciting and unique opportunity to build their own wireless broadband infrastructures making massive savings through use of, for example, internet connectivity between council offices, VoIP or even wireless CCTV. This is particularly so as local councils tend to own enough high ground, such as town halls or housing blocks, so as to allow a company such as Metranet Communications to deploy a metranet effectively and rapidly. At the same time, building a bridge between a local authority and a university allows for connecting a metranet to JANET, and on a European level SuperJANET, greatly enhancing the take-up of e-learning initiatives and we look forward to working closer with our local universities on a number of projects in the future.
