Mimosa and Cintel Hit a Home Run in Miami

When called to host Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game in June 2017, the excitement of the Miami city officials came tempered with a touch of trepidation. This would be the first MLB All-Star game the city had been invited to host, and on the heels of the very successful 2016 game in San Diego, the city had big shoes to fill.

Surveillance Expertise

To ensure the safety and security of Miami residents and the 37,000 attendees of the six-day long All-Star event, Miami turned to Cintel, a leading provider of turnkey, intelligent solutions for surveillance and security. Cintel’s typical customers include law enforcement agencies, government entities, airports and traffic management agencies, and made them a perfect fit for this job. Working with Federal, State and Local officials, Cintel designed a network to cover key locations in the metro area, including an over-the-water link to Miami Beach. Cintel needed a fast, reliable solution capable of carrying live video monitoring traffic from over 50 fixed and mobile HD camera sites set up throughout downtown Miami and surrounding areas. This traffic would be monitored 24x7 for a period of six days during the MLB events.

Public Safety Spectrum Pays Off in Congested Miami

Ariel Rodgers, Chief Technology Officer at Cintel, turned to Mimosa Networks, confident not only in the solutions’ throughput and reliability, but also in the company’s Public Safety spectrum expertise. “We were very excited to discover the support for 4.9 GHz on Mimosa products as we knew using this licensed spectrum in congested Miami would help greatly,” said Rodgers. “Once we filed the license application with the FCC on behalf of the city, setup was very easy.” Coupled with Mimosa’s proprietary Spectrum Reuse Synchronization technology to scale the city-wide network, Rodgers knew the Mimosa solutions would deliver the required capacity at fiber-fast speeds, much quicker and less expensively than running a wired infrastructure to each point of capture.

In the United States, the 4.9 GHz spectrum is reserved for licensed public safety applications, ensuring that the spectrum remains free of interfering cellular or WiFi traffic. As Mimosa CTO, Jaime Fink, explains, “Deploying solutions in the 4.9 GHz band is a great way for municipalities and government agencies charged with public safety to be quickly connected with high-speed wireless networks, avoiding the high cost and lengthy deployment times of traditional wired and fiber connections.”

In under three weeks, Cintel deployed close to 50 Mimosa devices, both point-to-point backhaul and point-to-multipoint access devices, with much of the equipment located on mobile surveillance trailers throughout the city. Cintel used a common SSID for each Mimosa A5 access point, ensuring the highest flexibility in deployment as the trailers could be moved on demand. “The network handled the over-the-water link perfectly, from a high-rise apartment building in Miami Beach to a command post located downtown with blazingly fast bi-directional speeds of up to 250 Mbps.”

During the main event, with hours of HD video traffic being streamed to a command center video wall, the quality of the video and the speed and reliability of the network gave city officials exactly the results they had hoped for.
 

Reliable Technology Delievered Flawless Streaming

“We rely on Cintel as respected subject matter experts in surveillance to assist our special events team with key projects. The selection of Mimosa for the RF network not only proved to be reliable, but exceeded all of our expectations,” said Major Alberto Alberto, Miami Police Department Special Events Coordinator. “My staff had 24x7 flawless HD streaming video from 40+ PTZ and Fixed Cameras throughout the event allowing them to concentrate on the actual security of the MLB staff and visitors rather than having to worry about technology. The new public safety RF network allowed us to avoid the cellular congestion which has plagued previous large-scale event surveillance in Miami.”

Mimosa is equally pleased with the results. “This is another network application demonstrating the maturity of Mimosa’s fiber-fast wireless solutions, and successfully proves the reliability, security, and capability of Mimosa’s solutions to deliver ultra-broadband services in the fastest time to market. IP-based video surveillance is expected to reach an annual growth rate of 25% over the next few years due to ever-increasing concerns over public safety,” said John Colvin, Mimosa’s SVP of Global Field Operations. “By offering this extended frequency range in many of our product solutions, Mimosa is uniquely positioned to serve innovative customers like Cintel in their public safety deployments.”

Miami will continue to be a hot bed of cultural activity, and with the Mimosa infrastructure in place and being expanded, the city of Miami officials can now offer the highest level of security for future city events, including the Miami Boatshow, Art Basel, the Ultra Music Festival and others.

Want to learn how Mimosa can help your network? Contact us today!