Successful Las Vegas Smart Park Project Highlights the Importance of the Right Wireless Network
In September of 2021, the City of Las Vegas and Cox Communications announced the kick-off of a pilot smart park project at Las Vegas’s Baker Park. As announced, the innovative project would deploy advanced cameras and sensors across Baker Park and its parking lots and would use the Citizens Broadband Radio Spectrum (CBRS) band to provide reliable and cost-effective wireless connectivity to support the cameras and sensors. Spurred by a request from Las Vegas Councilwoman Olivia Diaz who, in turn, was responding to calls to her office from residents about the safety of Baker Park, the smart park project was designed to enable officials to better monitor activities at the park. According to Las Vegas CIO Michael Sherwood, the promise of Las Vegas’s Smart Parks Program is to “analyze data and use it in new ways” that enhance the available amenities at the City’s parks and ensure that the parks are being utilized properly and safely.
A year after the smart park project’s announcement, the cameras and sensors are in place. City officials are using the anonymized data collected by newly deployed technological tools to advance public safety initiatives and support efforts to ensure that Las Vegas residents and visitors can access, use, and enjoy the sporting facilities and other amenities at Baker Park. The project is driving operational efficiencies for Las Vegas that keep the city from having to routinely drive the park now that city officials have visibility into the park’s operations in real-time. Encouraged by the successful collaboration, city leaders in Las Vegas and their partners Cox Communications are looking at other parks in the city where they can explore additional operational efficiencies and amenity options for their citizens.
Unexpected Bump in the Road During Project Deployment
To achieve the smart park project’s goals, city officials and their partners at Cox designed and deployed a wireless network that utilized the Citizens Broadband Radio Spectrum (CBRS) band to provide connectivity for the cameras and sensors at Baker Park. Deploying a wireless network would mean that the City of Las Vegas could avoid costly and inconvenient trenching that would dig-up areas of the park that were newly renovated in 2019. Using the CBRS spectrum would also minimize interference from wireless technologies using other spectrum bands and provide backhaul for the data-rich images transmitted by the cameras affixed to existing light poles throughout the park.
Relatively early-on in the project’s deployment, however, the CBRS wireless network was not performing as anticipated. Examining the network’s performance during initial tests, the project team did not see the data throughput they were expecting. After making several adjustments to the initial network deployment, the project team huddled and decided to replace the CBRS wireless network with a substitute wireless network utilizing unlicensed high-band spectrum. This new network successfully met the project’s connectivity requirements and continues to support the project. Currently, more than 5 Terabytes of data per month are running through the system deployed at Baker Park. Las Vegas’s smart park deployment at Baker Park highlights the value of a project team that can pivot to overcome unexpected technical challenges.
Effective Smart Community Solutions Are Rarely One Size Fits All
It is rare that a profile of a Smart Community project, like this profile of the project at Baker Park, includes a description of a technical challenge that required a significant change in the initially proposed solution or approach. Most often, we read profiles that paint a rosy picture of technology deployments without unanticipated bumps in the road. Indeed, we rarely read of projects where an unexpected technical challenge spelled the end of a pilot. It is important to acknowledge the midcourse pivot at Baker Park, however, because the project rightly highlights the importance of selecting a Smart Communities vendor that has the resources to support a municipality’s goals even if the original project plan is scuddled by an unforeseen technical challenge.
In the case of Baker Park, the City of Las Vegas and the Cox Private Network team were able to pivot successfully to a new wireless solution to meet the project’s objectives. Asked about the Baker Park project, Brett Lasher, Private Wireless Lead for Cox Communications, shared the following:
“To me, the successful project at Baker Park in Las Vegas illustrates that Cox’s Private Network Team can — and does — deploy and support an array of connectivity solutions and network implementations for Smart Community projects. Because we offer wired solutions and wireless solutions that utilize Wi-Fi, LoRaWAN, CBRS, Millimeter Wave bands among others, we can be fully committed to our customer’s goals when we design and propose a connectivity solution. We do not deploy the same connectivity solution for every project — akin to a hammer looking for a nail. We think drawing on the right spectrum and the right network design for the customer is a key component of any effective Smart Community project. The project team’s experience in Baker Park underlines this point.”
Three key take-aways from the smart park deployment in Las Vegas:
· First, monitoring the safety and usage of parks using video analytics is a winning application for Las Vegas.
· Second, a well-selected connectivity solution is central to the success of any Smart Community initiative.
· Third, there are a lot of connectivity solutions well-suited to support Smart Community projects.
Municipalities and other seeking to deploy Smart Community applications will be wise to consider partnering with vendors that can deploy and support an array of connectivity options. Doing so will help ensure that the proposed solution best fits a project’s specific goals and should provide greater confidence that a project would not be undone by unforeseen technical challenges.
Acknowledgement: The author wishes to thank Brett Lasher and Stephen Rusche for their willingness to share with me details about the Baker Park project in Las Vegas, Nevada. This piece would not have been possible without their input.
About this Medium Site
On this Medium site, I explore an array of topics related to the transformative power of smart and connected communities. A central question for this observer of the so-called smart community movement: how will municipalities, real estate developers, universities and other leading organizations develop, deploy and support smart and connected community projects at scale?
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