South Korea leads the world to become a ‘Smart Country’ thanks to Silicon Valley Firetide’s wireless networks used to deliver the country’s ubiquitous digital services. While large Firetide-based ‘Smart City’ projects are found in the U.S. as well as India, Australia and other countries, South Korea is implementing its wireless digital services country-wide.
South Korea leads the world to become a ‘Smart Country' thanks to Silicon Valley Firetide's wireless networks used to deliver the country's ubiquitous digital services. While large Firetide-based ‘Smart City' projects are found in the U.S. as well as India, Australia and other countries, South Korea is implementing its wireless digital services country-wide.
Firetide's wireless networks are providing digital services, known as the ‘u-Korea' project, to residents, tourists and municipal businesses in many of South Korea's cities, including the two largest Seoul and Busan. Firetide's wireless infrastructure has been deployed to provide critical infrastructure for a variety of applications from public safety and municipal department connectivity to Wi-Fi access and sensor networks. Firetide provided connectivity for networks in the Cheonggyecheon waterway restoration project and Seoul Forest, Seoul's largest park. In addition, Seoul City is using Firetide-based, real-time video surveillance combined with location-based tracking to help recover children if they are lost or abducted.
To preserve the environment and prevent natural disasters, the South Korean government is undertaking a major restoration project of the country's four largest rivers the Han River, the Yeongsan River, the Nakdong River and the Seomjin River and surrounding recreational areas. When completed in 2012, Firetide's wireless infrastructure will provide a sensor network for water level, temperature and pollution measurement; a video surveillance network to monitor the dams; and public Wi-Fi service for adjacent riverside parks.
“We selected Firetide because no other company offers the high performance, multiservice wireless infrastructure capable of reliably covering such a large area and securely supporting the concurrent transmission of real-time video, voice and data,” said Song Choong II, the ‘Four Rivers Restoration' Project Manager for Daelim I&S. “We are also impressed with Firetide's track record in providing wireless infrastructure solutions for applications such as the Seoul Subway and other ‘ubiquitous city' projects throughout South Korea.”
The Seoul Metropolitan Rapid Transit is installing Firetide wireless infrastructure mesh in Seoul's subway system. It is the first real-time, high-bandwidth mobile wireless video surveillance subway system in Korea and the world, costing an estimated total of US$60 million. Firetide was selected because no other vendor could provide the performance required to deliver streaming video from the stations to the moving trains at high speeds, while operating in one of the harshest environments for radio frequency networks.