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January 15, 20151 min read

How Open Standards Helped City of Lexington Save Taxpayers’ Money

  

The City of Lexington is located in the central part of Kentucky and serves a population of 300,000 people. Their airport also services about 500,000 passengers a year.

Both the city and the airport partnered together to upgrade their communication system to an Airbus DS (formerly Cassidian) 800MHz P25 trunked system with 550 Tait TP9155/9160 portable radios and 250 TM9155 mobile radios.

The primary driver for choosing Tait and Airbus DS was their adherence to open-standards. The City of Lexington and the Bluegrass Airport both had bad experiences in the past with proprietary technology.

Robert Stack, Director of Enhanced 911 explained it this way, “proprietary systems pretty much hamstrung the agencies buying only one brand of portable or mobile or when it was time to buy spare parts for a system they’re really was no choice but to go back to the vendor and pay whatever price they wanted to charge for those systems. We didn’t want that situation, and so we were very specific that we were looking for open standards in everything that we did, that we were looking for non-proprietary features in as much as possible so that we could get the best price and be good stewards of our taxpayers’ money.”

The city opted for the Tait Smart Value Plan, a 10 year program that allows clients to manage the total cost of ownership over the life cycle of their radios. The Smart Value plan includes a free radio replacement after 3-6 years and 3 battery replacements over the course of 10 years.

In this exclusive video, Robert Stack, Director of Enhanced 911, Ronnie Bastin, Chief of Police for Lexington Division, Scott Lanter, Director of Public Safety and Operations at Blue Grass Airport, and Sgt. Rahsaan Berry, Police Department of the City of Lexington share their experience about working with Tait and Airbus DS. Tait is proud of the work we’ve done to support their critical communications, and we’re also proud of the relationship we’ve built with these valued clients:

 

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