What are the lessons learned from managing multi-vendor integration and interoperability at scale?

Speaker: Johnathan Lewis, Innovation Division Director, Miami Dade Aviation Department

First and foremost, if anyone is looking to embark on this and hasn’t done anything yet, my strongest recommendation is to get a consultant. Ideally, choose one who does not perform the system integration themselves, but who has the expertise and understanding of what the process entails. Work with them to build a checklist or a framework for what you need.

There is a lot of “devil in the details” with private wireless equipment—subscriptions, licensing, radio types, radio heads, antennas, and all the associated costs. If you don’t have someone who truly understands these nuances, you can easily go down the wrong path and spend millions of dollars before realizing there was a better approach.

That’s the first big lesson.

The second is that you must look at this with a forward-looking perspective. Where is your platform today? What dongles are you using for device connectivity? Are they 4G and 5G compatible, or only 4G? All of those details matter when you’re buying equipment. Otherwise, you can spend a lot of money very quickly and then discover you need to go back and essentially reboot parts of your deployment.

You need that alignment to achieve the interoperability you expect from a private wireless network.