Firetide Projects Growth in Worldwide Municipal Public Safety Market
Firetide Inc., a leading developer of wireless mesh and access networks, today shared its assessment of the mesh market opportunity and provided its industry outlook for 2008. Taking a different approach to the municipal market known to most through the high expectations of city-wide deployments, Firetide quietly built a lead in the IP video surveillance and public safety markets, with 48 municipal public safety deployments in the US alone in 2007.
Throughout 2007, Firetide focused on IP video surveillance and public safety in the US, garnering in the process high-profile deployments including the City of Chicago “Operation Virtual Shield”, the Dallas and Phoenix Police Departments, and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.
“These projects are being deployed in phases and in specific target areas, such as in downtown Dallas where the network was recently expanded to cover the high-crime Jubilee Park neighborhood,” said Bo Larsson, chief executive officer of Firetide. “We see the larger city-wide municipal opportunities coming back when wireless mesh networks are able to support 100 Mbps throughput, and infrastructure ownership will reside primarily in the hands of the cities. For smaller municipalities with lower bandwidth needs, service providers and cities employing an ‘anchor-tenant’ business model will make sense, and we believe activity will pick up in this space later in 2008. According to our research, the worldwide municipal access and public safety market will grow 50 percent year-over-year in 2008.”
Municipalities – as all enterprises – need reliable, ubiquitous connectivity to support vital operations such as ensuring public safety, providing mobility to government workers, and supporting economic development and digital inclusion goals. The technology available in the 2006-2007 timeframe, at the height of the muni “bubble,” simply could not support all of these goals, leading cities down the path to public Wi-Fi® access, the least demanding of the applications. This development left the cities’ goals of implementing video surveillance and reducing recurring service charges for mobile communications unfulfilled and service providers in search of a viable business model to support public access alone.
“Against the backdrop of turmoil in muni wireless broadband and the negative effect it has had on many wireless mesh manufacturers, Firetide stands apart. The company has successfully pursued its strategy of focusing on funded, high value, wireless video surveillance and public safety applications, and as a result has secured a leadership position in today’s wireless mesh market,” said Berge Ayvazian, chief strategy officer of Yankee Group.
Alongside the municipal market, private sector markets – including transportation, industrial, and commercial – represent 60 percent of the market opportunity in 2008 for Firetide. In these markets, customers are deploying wireless mesh to support IP video surveillance, LAN extensions, and VoIP. Firetide is pursuing a dual-channel approach to reach these customers, going to market through both IT integrators and security dealers. As IP video technology and other IP-based applications become more widely accepted in the physical security space, the current boundaries between security and IT departments will disappear; but while these two entities operate independently, it is imperative for Firetide to pursue both.
About Firetide Inc.
Firetide is the leading provider of wireless mesh and access networks that enable concurrent video, voice, and data for municipal, public safety, and enterprise applications. Firetide HotPort® mesh nodes and HotPoint® access points provide a reliable high performance wireless infrastructure and access solution for video surveillance, Internet access, public safety networks, and temporary networks wherever rapid deployment, mobility, and ease of installation are required. Headquartered in Los Gatos, Calif., Firetide is a privately held company with worldwide product distribution. http://www.firetide.com.