Vail Increases Network Connectivity with Millimeter Wave Radios
The town of Vail is a small alpine village located in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado that was first established in 1966 as the base village for the world-famous Vail Ski Resort, the most-visited ski resort in the United States. The number of year-round residents in Vail is approximately 5,000, and the town’s economy relies heavily on the ski resort.
With more than 5,200 acres of terrain, Vail Ski Resort is one of the largest ski resorts in the world, hosting concerts and music festivals for large audiences throughout the year. Approximately two million visitors from all over the world come to the area annually to enjoy the resort’s amenities and powder snow.
Modeled after European ski towns, the town encourages the use of public transportation by operating a free bus service, which is the largest free shuttle bus system in the United States, within the town and to and from skiing attractions and the resort, in addition to maintaining several pedestrian-only zones. The town of Vail also offers free wireless Internet to residents and visitors, a popular service that is used heavily during special events.
Introduction
The town of Vail uses an underground fiber optic infrastructure to connect town buildings, such as city hall, the visitors’ center, and the fire department, with parking lot machines and surveillance cameras. The fiber network is used for the town’s security video surveillance system, and also delivers advanced public Wi-Fi, high-speed free internet on a segmented, stand alone system that is separated from the network used for security and other municipal operations.
The town hosts many events, including several large-scale events like the Go Pro Games, the Backcountry Ski Tour, the Burton US Open Snowboarding Championship and Women’s Ski Fest. With social events, concerts and other activities taking place simultaneously in multiple locations, maintaining network and wireless connectivity and also communication between first responders, volunteers, town officials and security personnel became essential to maintain a safe environment.
In 2015, the town of Vail hosted the International Ski Federation’s World Alpine Championships, which draws some of the best ski racing talents in the world. It was a three-week-long event that required the town and resorts to work with the Federal Bureau of Investigation on maintaining security for the competition. For the event, the town of Vail installed a temporary wireless, millimeter wave infrastructure that supported the addition of HD video surveillance cameras, a command center with a video wall, an integration between the town’s video management system and the FBI’s system and support for the heavy traffic on the town’s public Wi-Fi network when needed.
The event drew an estimated 200,000 spectators, athletes from 70 nations, an onsite media and broadcast entourage of approximately 1,500 and a worldwide television audience of an estimated 1 billion. The temporary video surveillance system allowed local security and FBI operators to monitor dwell and linger data at events, in addition to monitoring suspicious behavior and managing street traffic flow. The town felt the event went well and was impressed by the temporary surveillance solution. Following the event, the town of Vail sought to install a permanent and more powerful version of the Wi-Fi/millimeter wave infrastructure, to meet the town’s video surveillance, event, cellular and public Wi-Fi needs.
The Challenges
For the permanent solution, the footprint of the municipal fiber network needed to be extended in order to provide robust connectivity for large events, for both the public Wi-Fi network and for the town’s video surveillance network. The rugged terrain of many of the event locations ruled out the possibility of laying fiber in those areas, so the new system would need to be wireless.
The town had also been experiencing occasional service interruptions, which were likely caused by the video surveillance network’s heavy consumption of data. These interruptions had been impeding the essential 24/7 operation of the video surveillance network, affecting security communications and ultimately compromising site monitoring. During the World Championship event, the town had experienced some issues with network connectivity, particularly at network connection points, an issue that needed to be addressed with the new infrastructure as well.
To accommodate large events like the Alpine World Championship, the town of Vail wanted to upgrade its analog surveillance cameras to high-definition megapixel IP-based cameras. The town planned to add more than 100 HD video surveillance cameras to the permanent video surveillance system to replace its analog cameras and wanted an underlying infrastructure capable of supporting the town’s other connectivity needs, which included cellular backhaul. For most events in Vail, it’s not uncommon for 20,000 to 30,000 spectators to gather in a two-square-mile area to access the Internet and cellular networks. Because the town’s cellular network cannot handle such density of use, the town offloads some of its cellular activity to Wi-Fi, which also uses significant amounts of bandwidth and affects overall connectivity.
The town of Vail turned to their longtime wireless and systems integration partner Aspen Wireless Technologies for help with a permanent solution. Aspen Wireless has been the town’s telecommunications partner since 2005 and also was responsible for developing the temporary infrastructure for Vail for the World Alpine Championships. The town worked with Aspen Wireless to determine how best to provide the fiber-like wireless connectivity and reliability for big events, while also considering the security of the solution itself, as well as terrain and environmental aesthetics, an element important to Vail residents, town officials, and visitors.
“Aspen Wireless has been working with the town of Vail for the last 11 years, so we understood the complexity of the overall project,” said Jim Selby, President of Aspen Wireless. “Our goal was to meet the town’s connectivity and capacity needs, while also designing a solution that prepares Vail for the future.”
The Solution
Aspen Wireless helped the town of Vail chose Siklu Communication’s wave millimeter EH-600T radios, which deliver the fiber-like wireless connectivity and reliability the town needed for its permanent video surveillance network and other networks. Aspen Wireless developed an infrastructure that uses Siklu radios to transmit information between the wireless access points provided by Ruckus Wireless, which function as access points for the video surveillance, cellular backhaul, public Wi-Fi network and other networks. The town also added a new, IP-based video management system, three large-capacity network video recorders, and 140 new high-resolution cameras.
One of the prime reasons that Siklu’s millimeter wave radios were chosen as an essential part of the town’s new video surveillance system and underlying infrastructure is that they operate on 60-80GHz frequencies, which is a frequency band much higher than the sub-6GHZ frequency microwave bands used by many wireless technology and Wi-Fi networks. It is common for the lower bands to be congested by traffic and heavy use, while millimeter wave bands are interference-free and typically uncongested. This lack of congestion enhances the video surveillance system’s connectivity and is highly reliable.
Communications that use millimeter wave bands are inherently faster due to their higher frequency, which means the town’s Siklu radios transmit information within the video surveillance system much faster than the town’s former microwave band-based surveillance system. This speed translates into ultra low latency for Vail’s HD IP video cameras, which means the town’s security team can accurately and quickly monitor suspicious activity, particularly at large events that require active video surveillance.
“The Siklu radios we’re using move data - including transmissions between our high-definition cameras, the video management system, and high-capacity network video recorders - at a rate 200 to 500 times faster than our previous system,” said Ron Braden, IT Director for the Town of Vail. “The difference is staggering. We’ve gone from 20 to 30 megabits per second wireless backhaul capacity to one or more gigabits per second largely because of Siklu’s radios.”
The town moved its entire video surveillance system to the millimeter wave band frequencies, which also eases congestion and bandwidth usage on the lower frequency bands used by the public Wi-Fi network, another goal for the project. In addition, the radios are discrete, which was an initial concern for town officials.
The EtherHaul-600T are palm-sized radios that provide Vail with high capacity wireless point-to-point Ethernet connectivity to video surveillance cameras and other devices deployed on lamp posts, poles, traffic lights, buildings, and rooftops. The radios are small in size, with the EH-600T street-level radio measuring 5.9” x 6.1” x 3.54”, meeting the town of Vail’s aesthetic needs.
In addition, the town of Vail had sought an easy to deploy a solution to avoid disruption of everyday life in Vail. Aspen Wireless was able to deploy the radios and other network and surveillance hardware quickly, in a matter of only days. The radios’ support of service activation via the town’s network operations center also expedited the installation.
Today, Vail uses its nimble and robust video surveillance system for everyday public safety, large events and everything in between. The city’s traffic and code enforcement officers use the system daily for investigating crimes and events, as do law enforcement officials and other city departments responsible for public safety. When large-scale events are hosted in Vail, security operators use the infrastructure provided by Siklu to monitor crowd movements, car traffic, and suspicious activity, with the knowledge that the video surveillance network is reliable and fast. Vail can also use the data from the video surveillance system to plan for and forecast future events by analyzing surveillance details from previous events.
The Future
The wave millimeter radios have helped transform Vail’s previous analog surveillance system into an IP-based, wireless smart city HD video surveillance system whose speed and capacity improve the town’s live surveillance and investigational operations significantly. Security operators can quickly access and review high-definition video footage when searching for an event or activity or when monitoring events.
“Our municipal employees use the network extensively to access our security cameras and parking system, and our inspectors out in the field and police personnel often upload videos, which is done easily and quickly with the network’s high speed and generous data capacity,” said Braden.
About the Author: Alex Doorduyn is Siklu’s Director of Business Development and Sales.
