City of Norman, Oklahoma Implements RAD’s Airmux-200 & Megaplex-2100 for Public Safety Communications Network

The City of Norman, Oklahoma is home to the 22,000 students of the University of Oklahoma and another 104,000 permanent residents and growing. In order to provide for the public safety and welfare of Oklahoma’s third largest city, the 700 city employees - including police, fire, EMS, public works and administration - need a reliable communications system. Lance Terry, Norman’s emergency communications manager, became alarmed when employees began reporting that the 2-way radio systems were not working properly. “We knew we had a problem when we were getting complaints 3 to 5 times a week that our system was going down. Little did we know that we were losing all our LEC T1 connections every single day between 3:00 and 5:00 PM our prime drive time!” Investigating the problem was very difficult because the system, over time, had grown extremely complex incorporating many vendors, making trouble shooting difficult.

Lance turned to the city’s radio technician, Robert Stolz. Robert’s first objective was to find a back-up to support the failing system. His investigations brought him to Betts Telecom, a RAD Value Added Reseller in Oklahoma City. Betts was experienced dealing with state and local government and understood the issues immediately. Scott Walsh, Betts' Customer Engineer, met with Lance and Robert and quickly recommended that the City look at ways to consolidate all the various communications services into a multiservice platform that would also provide a central point for troubleshooting.

Scott recommended the RAD Megaplex-2100 because of its ability to consolidate a wide variety of communications services such as 4 wire E&M for 2-way radio, video streams, LAN traffic and low-speed data onto a common inter-facility link. “After we installed the Megaplex muxes, our new central trouble shooting capability pointed to the real issue: Our T1 connections were going down every day”, said Scott. “I have never seen anything like it.” Both Lance and Robert knew that they had to replace the expensive T1 connections with a reliable, cost-effective alternative.

“We decided to install point-to-point microwave connections and looked at three other vendors, including the biggest name in two-way radios,” said Lance, “but the Airmux 4.9 GHz radios were less than half the price of the nearest competitor, and the only one that supported our T1 connectivity.

So how is the new system performing? “We have not had one outage since we implemented the Airmux-200 systems,” says Lance. “If we ever do have a problem, we will know how to trouble shoot it and get it back up fast,” Robert adds. “We will keep the land-line T1 circuits as a back-up to the Airmux-200 systems until we are able to install a fail-safe redundant ring.” When asked if he is pleased with the performance of the new system, Lance gives a resounding, “Very pleased.”

As part of a two-year plan of continuing improvements, the City of Norman intends to implement a redundant communications ring interconnecting all of its locations to ensure maximum reliability. The RAD Airmux-200 and the Megaplex-2100 will continue to play a prominent role in the City of Norman's evolving communications network.