London's Westminster City Council Goes to Town with Cisco Wireless Technology
June 21, 2004
By Jason Deign, News@Cisco
London's Westminster City Council is building a wireless network across the UK capital's Soho district to help clean the streets of crime and refuse.
The network, which is due to be launched later this year and is based on technology from Cisco Systems®, provides a platform for WiFi (Wireless LAN)-based monitoring to supplement existing closed-circuit television (CCTV) systems.
It will also be used for noise monitoring and, in addition to Soho, will cover a low-income housing estate in the north of the city so that the impact of the wireless infrastructure on the delivery of social services can be measured.
WiFi devices on lampposts or sides of buildings will enable council employees with wireless devices to access applications on the corporate network that allow them to do their jobs more effectively and improve parking and street cleanliness, as well as cracking down on crime and disorder.
The network combines wireless technologies - for flexibility and mobility - with a wired network core providing high capacity, scalability and resilience.
Westminster City Council, one of 33 London boroughs, has 230,000 residents but the population grows by around 1.1 million people on a typical weekday. It provides a workplace to more people than any other borough in the UK.
It is also the center of tourism in London, with 28 million people per year visiting attractions such as West End theatres, Oxford Street, Leicester Square and Soho, plus government and royal buildings.
Westminster's West End, containing Soho, is the hub of night life and entertainment in London, containing 2600 pubs, clubs, restaurants and theatres. The council aims to become the best-managed city in the world with an approach which combines order, opportunity and low taxation.
The wireless network project follows the launch in July 2002 of a civic renewal program to transform customer service at Westminster, reduce cost and help develop new services.
The initiative aimed to make it easier to do business with the Council, renew the infrastructure of the City, deliver sustained improvements in education, meet the complex challenge of keeping the City's streets clean and clear them of illegal and anti-social behavior.
Westminster has experienced major challenges with controlling crime and disorder over recent years, mainly from the huge influx of visitors to Soho and the West End during weekends and at night.
The council has made huge strides in tackling the issue, with a 54 percent reduction in street crime in 2003, but it is a continuing problem. Westminster has one of the most sophisticated CCTV systems in the world, but it does not provide coverage in all areas and is costly to expand.
It typically takes between three and six months to move a traditional CCTV camera due to the planning, coordination and regulation needed to move street poles, dig cables and so on. Using WiFi, Westminster can relocate its monitoring systems within 24 hours.
The decision to use WiFi for monitoring across Soho follows a pilot, completed in January, to test wireless applications including CCTV, noise monitoring and secure intranet access in one small area.
The location, encompassing Soho Square, Greek Street and Frith Street, was chosen because it had no CCTV coverage and was an area of notoriety for drugs, prostitution and muggings.
This was also a good location to test the penetration of WiFi as it includes both open and narrow alleyways and spaces.
The pilot showed WiFi could provide good-quality camera images at 750 Kbit/s, 10 percent of the capacity needed for traditional CCTV. Cisco created a web-based management system so that cameras could be controlled remotely by an operator using a PC and a mouse.
The network even made it possible to view the live CCTV stream and control the camera from a mobile response unit, such as a CCTV van elsewhere in the wireless area.
Internet Protocol is the fundamental enabling technology in the Westminster project, combined with state-of-the-art digital color cameras, MP4 encoders, a PC-based management system and sufficient storage to hold images from all the cameras for a five-day period.
Wireless connections will be through Cisco 3200 Series Mobile Access Routers (MARs) and Cisco 1310 802.11b/g wireless bridge/access points mounted on lampposts and buildings. These will be linked to a Metropolitan Area Network.
The Cisco 3200 MAR will perform a pivotal function, essentially acting as the policy enforcer and the management point of traffic to and from the WiFi network. It will provide security in separating traffic for different services and be the point at which service levels are provided and measured.
In the short term, WiFi devices will connect to the network using the 802.11b wireless standard but there are plans to switch to the more advanced 802.11g protocol to maximize performance.
All WiFi-enabled end point devices will, where possible, support Cisco VPN client and wireless security methods based on EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol).
The WiFi network could be extended across the rest of the city, depending on the success of the Soho project and the level of savings and gains in productivity and service delivery.
Jason Deign is a freelance journalist located in Barcelona, Spain.
