When a hundred and ninety eight people died in a Korean subway fire in 2003, the folks at the Seoul Metropolitan Rapid Transit Corporation knew they needed a different surveillance solution.  The biggest problem was that they needed cameras that were capable of watching trains that were moving in excess of fifty miles per hour.

And so, what was their solution of choice?  Firetide’s own wireless infrastructure mesh system, a kind of streaming video.  It’s being installed either now or very soon with an estimated completion date of June 2010.  This isn’t a cheap setup, either–estimated cost is currently around a whopping SIXTY MILLION.  But they believe it’ll be worth it–check this out:

“Firetide was selected because no other vendor’s wireless mesh equipment could provide the high speed performance required to deliver streaming video from the station to moving rail cars and operate in one of harshest of environments for RF networks,” said Mr. Jung Yeong-Hyun, project manager of GlobalTelecom. “We were also tremendously impressed with Firetide’s sophisticated regional support organization that understood the difficulties posed by the subway system.”

So hopefully they’ll get their money’s worth, and prevent the next big subway fire.