How Pittsburgh Expands Downtown Situational Awareness with UbiHub and Axon

The City of Pittsburgh uses Ubicquia's UbiHub platform on existing streetlight infrastructure to support camera deployments across downtown locations that needed expanded situational awareness. By leveraging infrastructure the city already owned, Pittsburgh accelerated visibility where it was needed most — avoiding the cost, complexity, and delay of building a new surveillance network from scratch.

The approach reframed how public safety infrastructure gets deployed. Rather than treating public safety technology as a standalone infrastructure project, Pittsburgh's team recognized that much of what they needed — power, elevation, strategic placement — was already present in the streetlights distributed throughout downtown.

The challenge: expanding public safety visibility without breaking the bank

Cities face the same public safety visibility need as private property owners — cameras positioned in the right locations, connected reliably, and integrated with existing operations. But the traditional path (new poles, new cabling, new network, new permits) adds months to project timelines and inflates costs to the point where meaningful downtown coverage becomes a multi-year capital program. Pittsburgh needed a faster, more cost-effective way to expand visibility across key downtown locations.

The solution: existing streetlights as an intelligent deployment platform

Deployment planning identified multiple downtown locations where existing light poles could support expanded camera coverage without requiring new construction. Ubicquia deployed UbiHub technology on these streetlights, providing power, connectivity, and deployment flexibility. Cameras integrated seamlessly — including support for Axon-compatible video feeds — and went live in a fraction of the time traditional deployments would require.

By transforming existing streetlights into intelligent infrastructure, Pittsburgh expanded situational awareness capabilities while avoiding the costs, complexity, and delays of building a surveillance network from the ground up.