“I’ve been involved in a number of deployments where that’s got sidetracked because folks were wanting to try something new right up until the go live time. “Really staying focused on the objective had a great deal to do with achieving the success we did,” Singleton said. Singleton said that everyone was assigned to the areas where they had the most knowledge, and management kept a close eye on the scope of the project throughout. Everyone was pretty proactive and aggressive in attacking the timeline.” “You very seldom had situations where people were standing around waiting for something or needing something,” Singleton said. The city reported logging 480 man-hours - nearly three weeks - in just four days. Maurice Singleton, vice president of product innovation at VidSys, told StateScoop it did work, largely thanks to Hanagriff’s ability to coordinate of the various experts involved with the project and keep them focused. It gets to keep the cameras Axis donated, Verizon left behind some fiber, and Siklu donated radios. It did work, and now that the event is over, the city is enjoying the leftovers. I was kind of like, ‘Is this going to work?’” We had to plow through with radio because we had no infrastructure. “I had about 180 different radio frequencies down here at Discovery Green. “Verizon increased all their bandwidth and radio frequencies to support the Super Bowl,” Hanagriff said. Even with lots of partners and plenty of technology at his disposal, the introduction of so many people into one space presented situations Hanagriff said he wasn’t entirely familiar with, now that the city’s usual hard-wired cameras were largely out of the equation. No matter how robust you think your system is, he said, environmental changes can present new challenges that existing technology may not be able to handle. Hanagriff said the city got a lot of help, but overall the project was a lesson in flexibility. Preferred Technologies helped design and implement the new digital architecture. VidSys tied the old and new systems together so they could be accessed via a common platform. Brown Convention Center provided connectivity between Verizon and the city’s legacy system. Axis provided cameras, Verizon provided infrastructure via existing fiber-backed Wi-Fi. Another stream went into the Verizon cloud, allowing for easy sharing. One stream went into the city’s legacy system, which is a closed network that required a legacy terminal. Using loaned equipment, the video streams were split into two systems. Hanagriff said they started by identifying which critical and high-traffic areas they would target with the new cameras - areas where celebrities might appear to sign autographs or gates where visitors would be sure to flow through. “We’re in an age now where your decision makers, they want video verification. “Everybody wants cameras,” Hanagriff said. It used to be good enough to send someone to look around, Hanagriff said, but times have changed. It’s estimated the manpower and hardware would have cost Houston about $200,000 otherwise. The cameras also were donated to the city. In exchange for access to the public safety personnel who were using the technology in the field and permission to write white papers on the implementation, the city was given free access and support for the project’s implementation. Through partnerships with vendors and other government offices, Houston was able to put up a system that included 40 cameras and allowed public safety personnel to view live video feeds from any location by using a cloud-based hosting platform.
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