Architecture of the network carrying the video surveillance estate and command center for Super Bowl XXXIX, run with the Sheriff’s Office and the stadium management group. Coverage spanned the stadium bowl inside and out and the downtown event footprint.
Driven by an assessment, not a camera count
The program started from a threat and vulnerability assessment rather than from a number of cameras. Those produce different designs. A camera count produces even coverage and a procurement; an assessment produces uneven coverage that is dense where the analysis says it should be, and it tells you what the cameras are for, which is what determines where the video has to go and how quickly.
It included integration to airborne law enforcement assets, so the command center saw what the aircraft saw. A downlink from an aircraft is the one feed in the estate that cannot be surveyed, mounted, and forgotten — it moves, and the design has to hold while it does.
Three jobs, one person
I sat on all three sides of the same program: technical evaluator on the vendor proposal and selection, architect of the transport and command center the system rode on, and implementation oversight once it was awarded.
This one crosses an employer boundary. The game was February 2005 and the move from Coleman Technologies to the City came that April, so the program was delivered from the consultancy side and then carried into the client’s own estate — which is why it is filed under Coleman and named on the City era as well.
That is usually considered a governance problem, and in a procurement it can be. Here it was the opposite. Evaluating the proposal, designing what it runs on, and then living with the result are three different jobs, and holding all three is what keeps a vendor’s design honest — you cannot wave through an assumption you will personally have to operate. The optimistic bandwidth figure, the camera placement that needs a conduit nobody has priced, the latency budget that works on paper: each of those survives an evaluation conducted by someone who will hand the system to somebody else.
The wireless network carrying gate operations for the same event was a separate build, on separate radio.
Outcome
A command center that saw what the aircraft saw, on transport designed by someone who would have to operate it.