To enhance broadband access to community anchor institutions while upgrading the state’s public safety communications capabilities, New Mexico’s Department of Information Technology proposes a two-tiered project that addresses both objectives via a single network infrastructure First, the project will complete the tenyear analog-to-digital upgrade of the state’s microwave network by replacing 19 of the network’s towers that,
along with the existing infrastructure, connect to a 100 Gbps backbone network at several key points statewide. Second, SIRCITS proposes to utilize the microwave network’s towers to deploy a new interoperable 700 MHz public safety wireless broadband network in the Albuquerque and Santa Fe metro areas that would cover 220 square miles, 14 site locations, provide 1,500 first responder end users with speeds of up to 7.5 Mbps, and benefit a population of about 600,000 residents. Some goals of the new public safety network include streaming critical patient data from paramedics to hospital personnel; field access to records management systems for criminal, fingerprint, and mug shot information; building blueprints and infrastructure diagrams on the go to enable access for firemen; and video applications to improve situational awareness at incident command posts.