If This Had Been An Actual Emergency

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Wednesday March 20, 2002 @09:37AM from the you-would-already-be-dead dept.

saridder writes "In an increasing attempt to regulate the Internet like the current PSTN, the US Government has asked the IETF to come up with a system to prioritize government and emergency worker traffic in the event of another disaster, much like the GETS system already in place for the PSTN. It's interesting to follow, because it's only an RFC, so you don't have to follow it. I probably won't be prioritizing government traffic on any of my routers." The story has a link to the ieprep working group if you want to get involved or comment. Perhaps this is a better way than GOVNET.

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Television Scales Better by mlknowle · 2002-03-20 10:14 · Score: 5, Interesting

A broadcast technology like TV or Radio will ALWAYS scale better than a point-to-point technology like Telephone, TCP/IP, SMS, etc.

The best information distribution would be if there was a way to send a message to every phone in the country - to make them all ring at the same time - but that isn't possible with the way switches work.

This technology will never be useful for 'breaking' news distribution, like "GET OUT OF TOWN - TORNADO!" but rather could be useful for managing the long term (i.e., several days - weeks) effect of a massive attack (terrorist, military, or otherwise) on the nation's information systems.