Cook County, Ill., is among the local governments jumping on the wireless bandwagon in a big way – in fact, it may well be the first county in the United States to go all wireless for its public safety communications system with help from IBM.
The suburban Chicago county has tapped IBM Global Services technology and systems to build a wireless government communications system that covers the county and all of its 128 municipalities.
“Their desire was to be the first wireless county in the country, and I believe that is the case,” says Diana Hage, director of wireless services at IBM.That last part isn’t true; since as we’ve seen multiple counties in Oregon participate in a wireless network. Funny how big metro regions always think they’re first, even if a rural area has already done it. Nonetheless, it’s good to see a densely populated county doing this. They plan to use it for emergency communications. And for video from patrol cars, which raises various interesting questions, such as whether individual citizens will start doing video from their cars.
— Cook County Goes All Wireless with IBM, By Karen Brown, WirelessWeek, November 1, 2005
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