Municipal Wireless Idiots. AKA, NYC's Public Safety Boondoggle.

If you ever wanted a hard lesson on why the use of proprietary wireless technology is an extremely bad idea, look no further than New York City. I've seen estimates that the cost to wireless the entire city of New York would run $15-20 million. That's not chump change, but it's not a lot of money for a city budget the size of New York's either. And yet, the city has remained mired in internal politics, telcom FUD, and endless bickering and backstabbing.

So imagine my surprise when, in today's New York Times, I read about the Police Wireless system that was just installed in the NYC subways. It doesn't work -- in fact, they've known that it wouldn't work since 2001, but they built it anyway. And the pricetag? $140,000,000 already spent, with another $60,000,000 needed before it'll be operational. Think about this a moment, $20,000,000 to wireless the city, $200,000,000 to wireless the subway for police use.

Leveraging a public broadband system, the police could have easily built a wireless network that works everywhere for far less than the $140 million price tag. So why didn't they? At it's heart lies a woefully outdated conceptualization of "reliability." Police (rightfully so) need always on, ubiquitous, instant communications. Having spent three-and-a-half years working in emergency services, I know first-hand that this is a pie-in-the-sky ideal -- much like most vendor claims of "5-9's reliability" (i.e., a 99.999% uptime), municipalities get sold a load of hogwash. In my experience, our radios worked fine when we were in our offices, vehicles, or outside, but as soon as we descended into areas where we actually really needed connectivity, it became a crapshoot as to whether we'd have communication. Talk with any emergency responder with front-line experience and they'll tell you the same.

The problem is bad architecture -- the broadcast model for communication, AKA the "hub-and-spoke." I recently wrote a piece for GovTech, Disaster Response: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which is eerily relevant to the looming NYC debacle. No matter what you do, a hub-and-spoke wireless model will always have dead spots:

So the answer then becomes multiple transceivers -- lots of hubs to fill in the dead spots. Which, while usually better, is also a disaster for interference, congestion, etc. Meanwhile, one still has a single point of failure (the hub), and the end-user devices (the radios, in the case of the police) are dumb-as-a-brick. Of course, there's an alternative -- make the end-user devices smart, allow them to mesh, and allow them to communicate directly with one-another -- make the devices part of the architecture.

This idea is something I first proposed to the (then brand new) Department of Homeland Security in 2003 -- I also proposed that they invest in open technology (open source, open architecture) since that's the only way you'll ever end up with interoperable devices. Both ideas were turned down.

Which brings us back to New York City -- they built the wireless equivalent of the Spruce Goose -- using the same technology for purposes it wasn't capable of handling. They poured tens of millions of dollars into the endeavor, ignored serious problems with, for example, physics, and ended up with a product that doesn't work. All of this could have been avoided if they had simply been a bit more innovative.