Since 1991 when Georgia became independent from the Soviet Union, the Republic of Georgia has weaned itself from dependence on Soviet services and influences.
Since 1991 when Georgia became independent from the Soviet Union, the Republic of Georgia has weaned itself from dependence on Soviet services and influences. One of the services they relied on was, what had become an outdated and unreliable Soviet security technology. The entire population of Georgia relies on the Ministry of Internal Affairs Security Police for their security and they were not happy with the reliability of service being provided.
Because of the Georgian landscape, finding the right reliable alarm communications technology was a huge challenge. The Republic of Georgia includes cities, mountains, valleys, hills and dales. This terrain made finding the right security communications system difficult because most technologies depend on unreliable telephone lines and perhaps antiquated private 1-way radio technologies to communicate. In remote areas in particular, these options are not reliable and were very costly to implement.
They set out to find an alternative with a specific criteria in that the new system needed to be extremely reliable, vastly scalable, able to reach deep into densely populated valleys, and it needed to reach from one end of the country to the other while maintaining its integrity. This was not so easy to find. Initially, the Ministry of Internal Affairs upgraded to a legacy 1-way radio technology from an Israeli-based company but experienced significant reliability issues.
According to Zaza Gelashvili, Head of the Security Police under the Ministry of Internal Affairs, “We did not like the first radio system we tried because customers did not feel safe. They would wait for police responses from their alarm system and either it did not come because the alarm was never received or the police were being directed to the wrong location. For example, we had 5 regions in the city of Tbilisi, each region had different systems with different frequencies and none of them played well with each other. Maybe that 1-way radio system works for others but for our needs, it was unstable. We kept losing signals. It was as if the whole system was caving in on itself.”
Armed with his list of keywords, he set out to search for a system over the Internet. He found AES-IntelliNet and was immediately intrigued by the redundancy, scalability, reliability and speed claims of the AES-IntelliNet long range mesh radio alarm communications system and how it works. Georgio contacted
AES via email through their website and that’s how it all started.
Upon doing his due diligence, he also found that AES-IntelliNet’s mesh alarm communications system was easy to install and that customers would have complete control over the system from end-to-end. He was optimistic this could be the right technology for their needs and proceeded with his evaluation of the technology.
The scope of the current project initially involved providing mesh radio communications coverage for alarm monitoring in the ciities of Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia and Batumi, a seaside Black Sea resort city in Georgia. With those as successful starts, the Georgian Police have big expansion plans for its AES-IntelliNet network and plans to provide security services throughout the Republic.