By Calvin Biesecker
General Dynamics [GD] earlier this year delivered the first installment of the Integrated Wireless Network (IWN) to the Department of Justice (DoJ), providing various federal law enforcement agencies with a secure interoperable wireless communications system.
The initial deployment consists of 15 towers in the Washington, D.C., area, called the National Capital Region (NCR). In the NCR, the IWN deployment collapses 45 towers used and managed by various federal law enforcement agencies into the 15 that creates the interoperable communications network for DoJ agencies such as the FBI, United States Marshals, and Drug Enforcement Agency, the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, and the Interior Department’s Park Police.
“The IWN program is designed to collapse all of the current communications systems” any time the various agencies need to work together, James Norton, director of Homeland Security and Federal Strategies at GD’s C4 Systems business unit, told Defense Daily last week. “IWN puts federal law enforcement on the same interoperable network” with their different radios, he said.
The Justice Department four years ago selected GD over Lockheed Martin [LMT] to design and deploy IWN (Defense Daily, April 18, 2007). The two companies were previously picked over AT&T [ATT], Boeing [BA] and Motorola (Defense Daily, June 12, 2006).
In the NCR, the IWN deployment supports about 3,500 federal law enforcement agents. GD is currently designing the next deployment which will expand coverage north to the Baltimore, Md., area and south to the Richmond, Va., area, supporting another 3,500 agents, Norton said.
Eventually the DoJ and its partners at Treasury and the Department of Homeland Security plan to roll IWN out in critical regions around the country.