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Mobile Cell Phone Towers For Disaster Relief
cerberus4696 writes "According to today's Denver Post, Verizon recently premiered one of its new Cells On Light Trucks (COLTs), a complete, self-contained CDMA cell that can be moved to wherever it's needed, such as the scene of a natural disaster or a large public event. Since a standard CDMA cell can only handle a theoretical maximum of 62 calls at a time (usually less in practice), the network of permanent fixtures can quickly become overloaded in high-use situations. Verizon already uses a larger version of the system known as a Cell On Wheels (or COW; gotta love these acronyms), but as it takes three trucks and the better part of a day to deploy, nimbleness of response has apparently been an issue."
Communication actually is the first service that is needed after a natural disaster. It just turns out that cellular service gives the best bang-for-buck in terms of communication capability.
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Nextel has been doing this for a while as well, and recently, since they now are the primary sponsor for NASCAR, they have been taking enough of these units to all of the tracks to ensure that everyone can get NEXTEL service at the event. Great marketing.
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This could be an incredibly useful technology. Anyone who had someone in New York/DC during 9/11 knows how difficult it was to get a hold of anyone that day. Aside from the fact that cell towers went down with the WTCs, Verizons CO (central office) was right next to Tower 1 and 2, knocking out quite a few landlines. Switching capabilities were compromised, leaving most of us with "All circuits are busy." In the future, deploy a few dozen of these and the cell phone capacity could ramp up rather quickly in an extreme event.
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You may have victims trapped under rubble, or stranded in flood waters who can call for help thanks to this. Residents in the area of a disaster could potentially use up all of the capacity in a disaster area calling family members to let them know their ok. This would increase cellphone capacity in that area, just like they do at sporting events.
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There is the thing where you call your relatives to say you're okay. My husband better be trying his butt off to call me if he's ever in a disaster.
why would you need to see something that can essentially be the size of a pc case strapped on some roof?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I rather wonder, aside from the hobby aspect, how much longer Amature Radio will remain relevant. Seems disasters where AR would really shine and this sort of thing seems to replace them, as now pretty much anyone can afford a hand held phone, where once transmitters and receivers were the domain of those who actually cared enough to outfit and train themselves to be available for when there was need. Now you just whip out a cell phone and dial 911.
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I always thought that unmanned dirigibles would be great for something like this. Or for additional cellular (and wi-fi) capacity for special events, e.g. the olympics.
I mean, a couple of gyroscopes and some electric motors is all it would take to keep the thing approximately where it's supposed to be. They could carry batteries that recharge using solar cells during the day.
And then I thought, surely someone else has thought of this -- but I never hear anything about them, so maybe not.
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... are pretty much portable. There are perhaps half-a-dozen now across Rannoch Moor in Scotland. They consist of a metal "shed" with the cell tower antenna on top, and a diesel generator and fuel tank which gets topped up by a guy with a Landrover and a bowser every week or so. Typically they're sited on a hilltop, up to half a mile from the road. The cell tower "shed" is about the size of an Escort van, maybe a bit bigger. Certainly I see no reason why you couldn't fit the whole lot, with a folding antenna, into the back of a Ford Transit.
I digress... My point was, when a disaster strikes, you often have volunteers helping with the disaster relief. In our case, the volunteers were relying on cell phones for communications. Not everyone has access to police or rescue radios.
Wealso have those, but CDMA, for about 3 years here in Brazil. They're usually used in shows and sports events.
Mobile cells for disaster relief or for big public gatherings (concerts, festivals..) have been in Europe for years.. Here are pictures from floods in Prague in 2002.