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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."
Does anyone have pictures of these thingies?
Remembers me about those Lasershow-trucks from Lobo - they're really cool!
That seems really limited. Hell, I bet my local high school would saturate a cell every time class let out, there were always people making calls or listening to messages. I'm surprised I don't see more towers with the number of cell phones I see daily. Of course, I am from Seattle, so the lousy reception they mention applies to me :(.
Anonymous Coward
Whether or not roads would be open is in question not to mention its slow response time. Maybe they could make it fly or something. It's always cool when things fly, right?
..what happens if I use a competitor's phone system (like, say.. Sprint?). It's absolutely no benefit to me.
If they were really for "disaster relief" and not "public image relief" these mobile towers would be system-neutral.
Actually, I think it highlights a bigger problem - if the companies worked together with standards that were compatible, mobile phone coverage would be much better and busy networks would be much less of a problem.
Near the Pentagon in the first days after the attack they put up some towers and said they were using it to triangulate the location of cell phones that might still be on and inside the rubble. It ended up staying there for about six months or so.
Why not a blimp with CDMA cells tied to an anchor (truck, etc) with power running from the anchor? Seriously, you could probably tow a launch platform (uhaul sized trailer) behind a small pickup, suv, van etc with an He supply and a generator.
You drive to site, inflate, and let her pop-up. Crank up your Honda generator and away you go. And now let the EEs shoot down my idea (not literally).
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
"How do more people on cell phoes relieve disaster? I don't mean to be cynical, but there are much better tools for disaster workers, like radios and such."
So are they going to hand out radios to victims so they can be found?
"Derp de derp."
Loss of phone services in the situations the article describes is certainly inconvenient for the public, but hardly a disaster. Unless they were talking about the companies revenue.
I'd be more interested if they could find a way to set up fast communications networks when there has been an earthquake or such where good communications may really help rescue and reconstruction efforts.
But then in that situation you could certainly put more useful facilities on three trucks than a cell phone system.
Unfortunately, none of these would have really helped on 9-11. The fact that huge swathes of Verizon's infrastructure were taken out by the towers collapsing meant that it wasn't just a lack of cell tower capacity. They would've needed dozens of microwave links to even BEGIN to handle the loss. COLTs and COWs are handy for "lesser" disasters (floods, ice storms, etc) where a permanent cell towers are either out of commission or overloaded but most of the basic telecom infrastructure is still functional.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Now show me some news on GSM, then the 'rest of the World' might be interested.
The first COW I built/worked with was in '92. It was a low capacity system, but it was entirely self contained, including a telescoping 100 or 150' tower. You could literally drive it to a location, plug in power, the antennas, raise the tower, and have a functional cell. Using a generator, you didn't need to plug in power. And, in 92, cellular penetration wasn't that deep so the low capacity wasn't a big problem.
A couple of years later I saw a SOW (Switch on Wheels), though it took a little more effort to deploy, it was still useful -- especially when Iowa got flooded around '93, taking out a switch in the process.
I haven't worked on any modern CDMA gear, but I'm surprised a site would take 3 semi trailers. Does that include a switch, or just a single site?
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
I've already seen such trucks on festivals around Europe about 4 years ago and probably made quite a few calls through their systems too - nothing new here.
0x or or snor perron?!
At least for GSM such mobile base stations are technology which had already happened years ago. In fact one of the dutch mobile providers had a mobile BTS at the hacker camping HIP in 1997.