Colorado County Installs Exalt Microwave for Public-Safety LTE System

Adams County (Colo.) Communications Center (Adcom 9-1-1) is using microwave backhaul systems from Exalt Communications to build one of the country's first broadband public-safety networks using Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology. Exalt radios will ultimately be used to backhaul real-time data related to the critical, bandwidth-intensive applications needed to better serve residents of Adams County, a primarily rural area east of Denver covering 1,200 square miles, where broadband access is limited or non-existent.

ADCOM911 is a multijurisdictional public-safety communications center that provides voice, data and dispatch services to first responders at four law enforcement agencies and nine fire/EMS agencies. ADCOM911’s network infrastructure consists of a mix of legacy time division multiplexing (TDM) and IP technologies, with LMR sites using TDMA to carry voice traffic. To support this hybrid architecture, ADCOM911 is using Exalt all-outdoor 11 GHz systems.

"There has been an explosion in the need for real-time data by emergency responders, as well as a corresponding increase in the number of data-intensive applications being developed," said Walt Leslie, senior communications technician at ADCOM911. "Our goal is to extend the full desktop client of communications services to emergency responders throughout Adams County, wherever they may be."

While ADCOM911 uses fiber links to backhaul data in dense metropolitan areas, the majority of Adams County is rural and lacks broadband access. ADCOM911 needed a microwave solution that would reliably carry both TDM and IP traffic and asked its primary vendor Raytheon to recommend and provide equipment that could be used to build an advanced LTE network.

Source: Radioresourcemag