The Panasonic laptop computer mounted on the dashboard of Sgt. David Rosenblatt's cruiser boots up smoothly, but he can't connect to the wireless network inside Baltimore's police headquarters.
No problem.
He pulls the big Crown Victoria out of the garage and around the corner to a parking space on Lombard Street. In a few seconds, a cellular network takes over, streaming data from the city's computer-aided dispatch system to his PC quickly and flawlessly. "When it works, it really works," he says with a smile.
He taps the license plate number of a passing car on the keyboard, retrieving the owner's name, address and other vehicle information from the state's motor vehicle database. Then the sergeant swipes his own driver's license through a magnetic card reader attached to the laptop and retrieves the motorist's driving record. A 10-second e-mail conversation with a fellow officer in another district follows.
As part of a $3.8 million effort to enhance communication between officers and dispatchers, the city's Police Department has squarely stepped into 21st-century telecommunications. It's one of only two police agencies in the country using a system that marries "WI-FI" - the high-speed, short-range wireless networks popping up in homes, coffee shops and businesses - to a cellular data network with region-wide coverage.
So what's the miracle?
The officers using the two networks - cellular and WI-FI - need not do anything to switch between them. The seamless handoff of WI-FI to cellular network and back occurs without so much as hitting the "Enter" button on a cruiser's laptop keyboard.
When an officer in one of 140 patrol cars with the system pulls up to a district station, the laptop mounted next to the dashboard will automatically seek the local WI-FI network - installed at every district station and headquarters - for high-speed access to data on drivers and criminals.
Once the officer pulls away from the building, his computer switches over to a Verizon Wireless cellular data network known as Mobile IP, which is much slower but covers an area that stretches from Frederick County and the Pennsylvania state line to Northern Virginia and the Eastern Shore.
Unlike many home WI-FI networks, which are relatively easy to tap into, the police systems are secured by encryption and a fail-safe that limits access to authorized PCs.
So far, only Baltimore and Oakland, Calif., police are using the linked systems in the world of government; the first marriage of the two technologies for civilian use began this month in the San Francisco Bay area.
Although they've been around only a few years, WI-FI (wirless fidelity) networks have become increasingly popular in homes and businesses. Using an unlicensed portion of the radio spectrum, they're easy to set up, relatively inexpensive and don't require cables.
Pat Hurley, a broadband analyst for Telechoice, a telecommunications consulting firm based in Oklahoma, said several cellular companies would love to marry their wireless networks with local "hot spots," a term for shops, offices and other locations with WI-FI access.
Hurley, who also is co-author of Smart Homes for Dummies, says businesses are the most likely users.
"The general public probably doesn't need this because most of us aren't running around with a laptop," he says.
VoiceStream, a cellular operator based in Bellevue, Wash., sees the marriage of hot spot connections and cellular coverage as part of its overall strategy, says spokesman Bryan Zidar.
"We've got about 6,500 hot spots around the country. ... We want the road warrior looking for high-density data transfers to be able to move to the hot spot from the cellular network."
Police, of course, are the ultimate road warriors. The Baltimore and Oakland departments are using hardware and software from Padcom Inc. of Bethehem, Pa.
Aether Systems of Owings Mills has gotten Padcom to perform the WI-FI work while Aether, the lead vendor for the department's mobile wireless connections, provides software for computer-aided dispatching on Baltimore's laptops, personal digital assistants and pagers.
Mark Ferguson, director of marketing for Padcom, says the software and hardware constantly check for the best connection and perform the switch transparently between WI-FI and the cellular network.
Verizon says Baltimore and other police departments that use its cellular data system(including Howard County and Washington) can transfer data at rates up to 10 to 12 kilobits per second, a fraction of the speed of standard dialup modems. But Rosenblatt says that's more than fast enough for access to text data, such as information on whether a warrant has been issued for a particular driver.
Meanwhile, the city Police Department's WI-FI hot spots offer on average between 4 and 6 megabits per second - broadband speed that allows for significant uploads and downloads, such as photographs and, Baltimore Police hope, complete traffic and criminal reports.
Police departments around the country have used proprietary, radio-based data systems in patrol cars for years. But with an 802.11b network (the official designation for the type of WI-FI used in Baltimore), police can get the benefits of using standard software in much the way that home computer users have programs such as Microsoft Word and browsers for the Internet.
For example, Lt. Craig L. Meier, director of the Baltimore's department's communications technology section, said the new technology allows officers on patrol to use Global Positioning System satellites to pinpoint their own locations and the positions of backup officers.
Col. John Pignataro, the department's information technology chief, has big dreams for the system. In the coming months, patrol officers and detectives will write criminal and traffic reports on their laptops and send them directly into the department's computer system through the high-speed, WI-FI access points.
"We've had an antiquated system of collecting data," Pignataro says. "We would write a report, give it to the district, the district would bring it to headquarters, where it would be put in the database."
With the information stored electronically, anyone with access to the secure system - on the street, in district police offices, at the dispatch center - will be able to pull up reports or compile statistical data in minutes, not days, says Pignataro.
Meanwhile, Meier says he has already placed a few low-resolution test photographs onto the Police Department's servers. Eventually, when officers are ordered to search for specific suspects, they'll be able to look to their computers and download mug shots from the server.