Motorola Unveils Mobile Solutions For First Responders, New Channel Program

Motorola announced three new solution sets catering to first responders this morning at the 2006 Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) conference in Orlando, Fla. In addition, the company launched a new program that assists solution providers in tailoring those offerings.

Motorola says its new solutions go beyond Wi-Fi to better enable surveillance capabilities and real-time communication between first responders, their offices and each other. First reponders include fire fighters, paramedics and police officers.

"Wi-Fi is a wonderful commercial product, but we don't think it fits the needs of public safety," says Mike Fabbri, director of data solutions operation at Motorola. "[First responders are] all in motion and need information on the move. We're excited to offer three new solution areas focused specifically on this marketplace."

The first, Mobile Office for Government, extends back-office applications, be e-mail, report writing or records management, to field personnel through the combination of Motomesh, Motorola's wireless broadband technology for municipalities, and Multi-Net Mobility, a product released in March that provides a secure virtual private network. While Motomesh acts as the transport, Multi-Net Mobility allows users to shift across multiple networks and maintain the session.

"I might utilize Motomesh for certain areas of the city, and another private data network or even a carrier network to augment coverage," Fabbri says.The second offering, Motorola's Intelligent Video Solutions, encapsulates video sources -- cameras mounted at a location or in a car -- connected to a back-end video management system that provides recording, analytics and transference capabilities. Mobile Video Sharing enables officers en route to an incident to pull live video from the scene, evaluate the situation and determine an appropriate response, while also sharing the video feed with other responders in the area. The offering is currently in trial with the Los Angeles Police Department for a high crime zone of the city.

Motorola's third product, the Event Management solution, allows ad hoc networks to be formed so that multiple response vehicles can establish a connection independent of the citywide infrastructure and immediately share surveillance and information to better manage the incident. A point-to-point wireless Ethernet bridge allows communications over the 4.9-GHz public safety spectrum.

In addition, Motorola announced an Application Developer Program, which provides enhanced capabilities around these technologies to enable tailoring of solutions to customer needs. Solution providers and software developers can build enhanced capabilities in and around these existing solution sets, and gain authorization through Motorola that provides the "Motomesh Ready" stamp of approval.

"A [solution provider] might want to offer incident scene resource management to a [police department] for a particular event; the software, coupled with the ad hoc capability of meshing, provides a strong event management solution," Fabbri says. "They can provide very high-level specialization for particular segments. We offer a number of products supporting all of these various solutions, but we also rely on third parties to a large extent. The program is a mechanism for those third-parties to make applications more readily available to the customer base."

PODCAST: Mike Fabbri, director of data solutions operation at Motorola, chats with GovernmentVAR senior editor Jill Aitoro about new products and services available to VARs serving the public safety community.