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Communications Infrastructure No Match for Katrina
jfourier writes "In this age of cheap commoditized consumer electronics and advanced mobile technology, why can't all the people of a city make contact during an emergency? Cell phone circuits filled up during 9/11 attacks and in the wake of hurricane Katrina very few victims can make contact with their families, despite the fact that they have all those mobile phones. The Red Cross is looking to deploy satellite equipment to restore communications in affected areas." From the article: "Katrina made landfall in Louisiana early this morning with sustained winds of 145 mph, but veered just enough to the east to spare New Orleans a direct blow. Even so, flooding, power outages and heavy damage to structures were reported throughout the region.
The Red Cross tomorrow expects to begin deploying a host of systems it will need, including satellite telephones, portable satellite dishes, specially equipped communications trucks, high- and low-band radio systems, and generator-powered wireless computer networks, said Jason Wiltrout, a Red Cross network engineer. "
Wouldn't satellite signals be affected by rain and wind?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
What happened to the article about 50% of science articles being wrong and whatnot.
Do I even need to say it?
Ever since the midwest blackout I've been meaning to get an operator's license... for 2m if nothing else.
https://www.redcross.org/donate/donation-form.asp
1-800-HELP-NOW
Beat out messages on drums!
Of course the system failed. The cities have flooded, there is no power in much of the area, and a good number of towers and other infrastructure has been damaged.
The winds reached 140+ miles per hour. The uplands received 5+ inches of rain in 24 hours.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Let me point out that this is one of those times when battery operated amateur radio provides one of the best ways to get messages in and out of an affected area. In fact, this story at the ARRL has some information on how hams are helping in the recovery effort.
In this age of cheap commoditized consumer electronics and advanced mobile technology, why can't all the people of a city make contact during an emergency?
That is the dumbest question I have ever seen on Slashdot.
Sure, cell PHONES are cheap, but have you priced the towers and the infrastructure that SUPPORTS the phone? Plus, even though your cell phone has a battery, the batteries at the cellular provider won't last long when the entire frickin' CITY is without power.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
I remember a story some time ago about a plan to deploy blimps for cell and wi-fi service. I wonder if that plan might be viable now? They could fly away for the storm then fly back shortly afterwards.
WTF do people expect? Millions of people displaced and each having at least one relative and likely several in other parts of the world trying to reach them. This is to be expected. Why should a network outage and phone difficulties be news in such a catastrophy?
I live in Charlotte, NC, and it's often difficult to place a cell phone call during rush hour traffic here. If we had a major disaster, no doubt the same thing would happen to us. The cell phone networks obviously were only designed to support a small fraction of the total number of cell phone users in the area at any given time.
-Crow T. Trollbot
What do you expect if the entire infrastructure is land-based copper, and most of everything else is heavily damaged as well?
RF isn't a great answer, either, not as a viable backup for the entire tellecommunications infrastructure, because you only have so much bandwidth in the air before you start frying people with microwave, and the FCC isn't likely to open up frequencies, even in times of emergency like this. That's not to mention electricity distrobution.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
who's evacuated out of state and has a cell phone with long distance service, but people are having problems calling TO him. Presumably because the call is still trying to get to New Orleans to figure out where to forward his phone call.
...could mean only one thing - invasion.
The answer is a very low-tech solution: ham radio powered by batteries. A ham radio at the Artic Circle or in the jungles of the Amazon rain forest works consistently and reliably. The only way that a ham radio could fail is the total disappearance of the ionosphere, which allows ham radios to bounce their signals across the globe.
to live in either place, in northern Chicago, we've never even had a tornado, much less strong earthquake or hurricane.
That thanks to the red cross i can download porn in hurricane stricken areas?
http://www.arrl.org/
Amateur Radio Volunteers Involved in Katrina Recovery (Aug 30, 2005) -- Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) volunteers in Louisiana are engaged in the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort, and more are waiting in the wings to help as soon as they can enter storm-ravaged zones. Winds and flooding from the huge storm wreaked havoc in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama after Katrina came ashore early Monday, August 29. Louisiana ARES Section Emergency Coordinator Gary Stratton, K5GLS, told ARRL that some 250 ARES members have been working with the Red Cross and the state's Office of Homeland Security Emergency Preparedness. Much of the affected areas remain flooded and dangerous, however. As a result, state officials have not allowed emergency or other units to enter the flooded zones, and there is still no communication with many coastal areas.
Because maybe, just maybe, things like medical care, water, food, shelter, and clothing take priority? Just a guess...
A simple Troll, born of Rock and Fire, leaving in the basement of my parents volcano and typing on an asbestos keyboard.
why can't all the people of a city make contact during an emergency?
Phone networks are engineered for predicted average demand. This level is occasionally exceeded during regular use. The demand for communications during an event such as hurricane Katrina skyrockets. To build a network capable of satisfying these peak demands would multiply the average user's bill, and few people would sign up.
Quite simple, really.
Technology can certainly help us in times of need. The Mayor of New Orleans was able to order an evacuation, through the great telecommunication and media infrastructures that we have, people were able to be warned, which probably saved thousands of lives. I say this, because when natural disasters like this hit third world countries, there are many, many, many more deaths. So our communications infrastructure and other technologies DO HELP. Of course, we have had television and radio and the like for a while, an evacuation and warning like this would have been possible probably even 40 years ago. This catagory of technology would also include things like interstate highways, helicopters, boats, and the like, which help rescue operations get where they are needed. Another development we have that helps is a highly organized and functional government. George Bush can immediately grant disaster funding to these states and the rescue operations get moving. Without government direction and organization, it would take whatever volunteer goodwill organizations that go down there a lot longer to coordinate their efforts, and would be much less effective. It is true that the cell phones stop working when the power is cut to the tower, but the same is true for regular phones. But, the amazing thing is, to restore phone service we can fly a couple satellites, which is a lot easier than waiting for the water to recede and rebuild all the phone lines. So technology is helping in this case as well. A disaster like this does show us how powerful nature is, and that sometimes there is nothing we can do to stop a disaster, but we can do our best to minimize the tragedy.
It seems like Verizon, Sprint or someone could make a boatload of money from opportunities like this. They could have a few mobile cell towers that run from generators. When a tornado, hurricane, wind storms, or whatever hit, they truck those towers in as temporary replacements. The local government will appreciate it. The local cell phone users will appreciate it. The people not on their plan will make them a bundle in roaming fees!
They could store them centrally inthe country. Since they usually have a large warning, they could get them nearby the pending storm. Right after the storm clears, instant tower.
3. Profit
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
"In this hypothetical storm scenario, it is estimated that it would take nine weeks to pump the water out of the city, and only then could assessments begin to determine what buildings were habitable or salvageable. Sewer, water, and the extensive forced drainage pumping systems would be damaged. National authorities would be scrambling to build tent cities to house the hundreds of thousands of refugees unable to return to their homes and without other relocation options."
Crow T. Trollbot
The networks are not designed for theoretical maximum capacity, they are designed for average peak observed capacity. If there are 1 million cell phones in use and only 10-20% of them are actively transmitting at a time during normal use, why shell out for 5 times as much infrastructure as is needed to support that level of use? A catastrophe like Katrina or 9/11 only happens once every few years; the rest of the time the excess capacity would only be draining resources - not just from the corporate bottom line, but from maintaining the 10-20% of the equipment that's actually used by subscribers.
and why I prefer the northeast. 0 serious earthquakes, 0 landslides, 0 hurricanes, 0 tornados (mostly anyway)
There just aren't much of any natural phenomenon that you can't adequately prepare for in advance up there.
Sadly I'm in DC these days...the home of some the most obscene unnatural disasters, our very own House and Senate...ugh
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Once you take away the antenna your cell phone talks to, it's about as usefull as a paperweight for communication
Yeah, just those annoying blackouts and riots, eh? :)
Gee, this is a tough one...
Well, lets start with the obvious: Mobile phones have to connect to a network via a series of towers. Now, with the power out, some towers will be down, diminishing the available coverage. Some towers, however, have their own generators. permitting them to run despite power interruptions. Few of those, I imagine, come equipped with snorkel kits in the event 25 feet of water come rushing over them, and so have likely stopped working.
Next up is communication lines. In case it wasn't made clear to you elsewhere, cell towers aggregate the individual calls together and send them out over a cable - "hard line" for fans of The Matrix. When 120 mile-per-hour winds come whipping through your town, some of these cables will inevitably be torn down. Some run underground - not sure how common this is in New Orleans, where underground is just that much more moist. In any case, most of these technologies rely on power running along the lines, power at the endpoints, or both. When the central office loses power, it doesn't matter how many cell towers sitting atop hills still have functioning generators and great coverage... the calls won't leave the area.
Finally, welcome to the concept of oversold bandwidth. Simply put, there are more phones out there than there are available lines to connect half of them (each call has two phones, so...). This is based on the time-honored knowledge that it is extremely rare for everyone to want to use the phone at once. It would be far too costly to make it possible for everyone in New York to be on the phone at once, especially since most (>80%, is my uneducated guess) of the bandwidth would sit, un-used, for most (>95) of the time.
In order to prevent disasters from causing communication problems, we would have to throw money at the problem. We'd need cell towers with self-contained air supplies that could last x days, as well as over-blown fiber connections meshed around between different towers to share load and act as fault tolerance. Cell service has the same problem as the Last Mile in broadband... like it or not, the last mile is a single point of failure, that can only be protected by extraordinary - and expensive - measures.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Maybe now that the power is down, all that broadband-over-power-lines will be down so the ham radio operators can help with the truly urgent info.
Hey! I'm in New Orleans and my cell is just working fi
NO CARRIER
zosxavius photography
One of the city levees has been leaking and without power they estimate the homes of hundreds of thousands will be flooded. Without power there's also the lack of pumps running. Much of the city is 6 ft below the level of the Misssissippi River.
This is pretty much your worst case scenario in the Gulf Coast happening. Nice weather now, but people won't even be allowed back to some neighborhoods for at least one week. Others are still being evacuated, by boat, as flood waters rise.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Cell phones are like gym memberships and broadband... completly oversold.
It's too bad they don't advertise this limitation -- but why would they?
They would rather have thier customers draw thier own realistic expectations as it's clearly better than reality.
Wind does not affect satellite signals. It effects the dishes. Rain does attenuate the signal however. Regardless, the storm will have blown over by the time the Red Cross gets the equipment setup. All and all this was not a well thought out post: 1. Capacity : Yes, the cell companies could build out the capacity to support everyone calling at once but you don't want to foot the bill. Every once in a while you need to speed to pass some one, you don't buy a porsche do you? Why? Because most of us justify it, much less afford it. 2. Robustness : Lets see if you house stands up to 20 feet of water and 145 mph winds. I'm certain it won't... why not... because you don't want to pay for it. Cell phones are not a public service, they are a commodity and are priced and scaled accordingly. I'm sure the cell phone companies would be more than happy to accomodate you if you'll sign the 10 year $250/month service contract.
That's assuming that you're IP provider still has active data connections, the wind hasn't knocked over the cables you're relying on, and any number of things. I swear, a lot of you need to go to one RACES meeting and realize what emergency communications is really like. You can't rely on the base infrastructure to be in place below you in an emergency.
I guess smoke signals are out of the question.
The Chronic *WHAT* les of Narnia!
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Not to be a whiny bitch, but...
What about the fucking power? I live in South Florida and my lights and air were out till fucking 7:45pm last night. This storm was a pussy when it here in Broward County, yet the lights were out for 4 days.
Sorry...back to people with real problems...
BTW: My Cingular phone worked perfectly the whole time, Nextel/Sprint's were having trouble.
Hm, lets see you build a telecom infrastructure that can handle 100% of its customers usage at the same time, oh wait, subscription plans will cost $1000/month, do you see the problem?
Internet, phone, etc all carry WAY more subscribers than they can handle at one time for a good reason, ECONOMICS and they all don't use their services 100% of the time. If they did then you would be complaining about $1000/month cell phone bills, so I guess no matter what we would still get hear you whine... arg.
I think that one of the reasons why we cant connect, isnt the fact of cell phone towers being down, or equipment being down. Its more along the lines of the way the system is built. If you are a cell phone company, and have 100,000 subscribers(these numbers are estimates btw), you should build your network to hold 200,000 subscribers. Im sure alot of these networks arent built to handle more than they have. In essence what the companies support are much less because if they have 100,000 subscribers, chances are not all of them will be using the phones are the same time. So they only have the network supporting 40% of the subscribers. If there happens to be a disaster, everyone is trying to call in, and everyone is trying to call out, so it fills up the network and you get the dreaded, all our lines are busy atm please try again later.
This situation happened with 9/11 as well and im sure there were many towers that went down, it was only 2 buildings.
The following links are to photos of one of the vehicles the Red Cross uses.
These photos are courtesy of Michael Failing, and were taken at the 2004 Chicagoland Emergency Vehicle Show.
I'm amazed I haven't seen any bad Katrina jokes yet.
ATTN HAM RADIO OPERATORS:
After watching all of the major news outlets they are all mentioning that communications in and out of the city of New Orleans is practically nullified.
Tens of thousands (if not a hundred thousand) or more are trapped in the city following hurricane Katrina. This problem is worsened by the fact that after this cyclone, the city is flooded and the waters are RISING, not receding! This is an urgent situation and needs immediate attention!
Because of the need of hundreds of search and rescue missions, and the lack of ability of communications infrastructure to operate, assuming it is still existent at all, I would call FOR EVERY AVAILABLE HAM RADIO OPERATOR TO ATTEMPT TO GIVE THEIR ASSISTANCE TO THIS AREA!
Well-prepared self-sufficient mobile ham radio operators would make a difference in saving lives and passing 'life and limb' traffic in and out of the disaster area. I would like to propose hams descend on the city and surrounding areas to provide a temporary communications infrastructure until such time that officials are able to provide this on their own.
KG4JYD
Matt Collins
Nashville, TN
Libertas in infinitum
Why don't the Red Cross has mobile base station ready to deploy in containers? Complete with fuel, generators and atennas. Ericsson has developed microcells for this use.
FCC should force phone companies to have at least 48h of backup power in case of power failuers.
and didn't chicago have a great fire that wasn't really so great?
Some of the residents of NO are too busy looting non emergency related items to even begin to think about alternative communication methods.
They need to drain the city to get the power back on, they need power to drive the pumps to drain the city...
I've heard some officials speculating that New Orleans could be under water for weeks or even months. My heart goes out to everyone affected by this tragedy.
I always thought that the biggest hazard to New Orleans was the Mississippi overflowing, since they had two 100-year flood seasons back to back in the last decade.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
To rebuild stuff *under sea level*. Idiots.
Most universities in New Orleans are down without power, as are most small businesses.
Does your company or institution have a web-site-redirect plan if your web host goes dark for more than a few hours, or in this case, weeks?
It doesn't have to be a full mirror, a page that simply says "We are temporarily closed for business due to a disaster" along with contact information is usually enough for small businesses.
Just be sure the contact information is valid for the duration of the outage.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
RF isn't a great answer for EVERYONE to chat up with their friends and family.
..... That traffic is secondary to priority and emergency traffic for the served agencies (FEMA, Red Cross, Salvation Army, etc), until the land line and other services are restored.
However, RF - as implimented by Amateur Radio Emergency Services (ARES) and the National Traffic System (NTS) can provide health and welfare traffic ie. I'm alive in 'selter location' with
73 (best regards).
Peter AI6PG
During this disaster Amateur radio operators (almost always the first communications up and running) have been of significant assistence.
:-/
BPL will make amateur radio effectivly unusable if it is implemented widely.
But but but... I hear you saying... BPL won't be creating interference when the power is down!
What people forget is that amateur radio operators use thier radios between disasters, including practice disaster scenarios.
If BPL becomes widespread then they (we) will be significantly disadvantaged and it will start driving amateurs away from this hobby (this hobby which has so many community benifits).
This can already be seen with the restrictions on antennas (covenants etc) that are becomming more and more common.
If this trend continues we might not be there next time we are needed
Like ...
1. Run hard wires underground to protect them from wind. Obviously some places already does this, and it has the side benefit of eliminating unsightly overhead wires.
2. Protect the underground wiring from water. We obviously know how to do this, otherwise we couldn't be running cables along the ocean floor.
3. Make cell towers more resistant to damage. A 175 mph wind sounds like a lot, but it is by no means something we cannot defend against. And put the generators for the towers up off the ground at least 25 feet. Also not difficult.
4. Come up with something better than fixed size circuits. Sure, I'd like my 64K voice channel when all is normal, but I'd get by with a lot less if all I needed to do was basic communication. Cell phone companies already do this with the wireless end of things. Now the phone companies have to finish implementing it on the hard lines.
Those are just thoughts off the top of my head. Perhaps I'm way off base, but I just don't see that there is any insurmountable difficulty in building a communications network capable of handling spikes in demand that far exceed its average usage. Is this what we get for letting capitalism alone decide what technology we use?
Dropping solar-powered wireless mesh nodes where needed.
/. right now! Don't you think they'd appreciate this?
Hey, imagine all those nerds stuck in emergency shelters that can't read
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Of course the systems failed because there's no money to be made in building the kind of redundancy into the system that's necessary to keep running. It would be possible to build a hurricane resistent communications network but you'd have to pay a lot of money to do that. When you are competing for subscribers, they aren't going to pay significant more for "works during a hurricane" promotions.
For these providers it's easier to build a fair weather network and then handle the repair of those networks through insurance. In fact, it's probably a benefit to them because they'll be able replace aging equipment with new gear paid for by their insurance policy.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
why can't all the people of a city make contact during an emergency?
Uhhhh, for the same reason us 6.5 billions citizens of mother earth let a hand full of scumbags ruin everything else in our lives?
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
AS a capitolist, i would have to say that one of our downsides is that we dont "do it right the first time", because its not financially expediant.
Cell Towers: Built not for emergancies but to "cover" as many people as possible to make as much money as possible.
Communication wires: IT would cost way to much money, to dig, and plant wiring deep underground. Since nobody would profit from it, and since the government will probably bail out the communication companies so they can put up the same wires above ground, if wires do not become obsolete in the next hundred years, the same problem will occour.
Power Grid: Ancient power grid, and would cut into power companies profits to upgrade to a failsafe system, (much like the above communications) or underground nukes, and wires.
A friend of mine has been able to get text messages out of Biloxi, MS (he is OK, thank God!). Now they're struggling to find the closest operational airport to get them back home (they were contract workers - were because what they were working on is now decimated).
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
In NYC after the 9/11/2001 planebombs blew up the World Trade Center, including the vast telecom infrastructure centered in 7 World Trade, phone service was crippled. But for the city government, that lasted only a couple of days. The City's IT department ("DoITT") took an in-house VoIP experiment, and prematurely deployed it to over 50,000 of the City government's 75,000 desk phones. They actually worked a few blocks from the smoke-choked Ground Zero to install telecom servers over existing TCP/IP LANs. Which gave not only dialtone, but the conferencing, connectivity and security demanded by that unprecedented crisis. The next several weeks saw the high performance of that emergency replacement, coping with the vast weight of the telecom organizing the city's recovery from the catastrophe.
New Orleans ain't New York City. I lived there, too, and I know it's hardly "Silicon Alley": It's Carbon Swamp. The telecom services there aren't really comparable to NYC's, even on leisurely good days. But the Big Easy could take a lesson from the Big Apple, just as all cities can. We proved that disaster recovery can be highly effective, and those results are available to the world. These scale disasters are becoming more frequent. People should become familiar with techniques for coping with them now, before the crisis, when planning and preparation can be done on one's own schedules, and not merely the best one can do when disaster strikes.
--
make install -not war
Big shot. It is 6200x8000 pixels and 8.4 MB big. Amazing how clear and big we can get with today's satellites.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
a storm blows away peoples wooden houses and they complain that they cant get a fricking cell service
and the world is falling ? LOL you can see why this story is now just a footnote on the daily news in the rest of the world with attitudes like that, America used up its sympathy card a long time ago, now nobody really gives a shit and certainly are not donating cash, see Dick&George for an advance this time
in the mean time thousands, not hundreds but thousands of people died in Africa today through lack of food and disease (they dont know what houses even are) yet none carries that story at all, yeah we are civilized countries LOL.
perhaps this storm was just payback from the folks who have been praying hard in Iraq/Iran/Syria/Sudan/Cambodia/Palestine/Cuba/Ven
sleep tight
With my cell phone, I can hardly make contact under normal circumstances. %&#* T-Mobile.
0? im in RI and we had gloria in the early 80s and bob in 92 or 91. And other smaller ones
I've never seen a tornado though
Anyway, whenever theres hurricanes i always hope they come and hit RI. I like worrying about my life/property. Life is boring without the fear of losing it all.
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If cellphones were designed for the benefit of the user, they would be able to communicate with each other directly, bypassing the towers. Sure, the range would not be fantastic, but relays etc. would fix that.
:v)
Of course, cellphones are designed for the benefit of the consumer - in this case the telcos, not the end user - you. If our phones called each other direct, telcos don't get to clip the ticket and make their bucks. So we get a service that only works when they do.
Oh the joys of the "free market", where the feedback from market forces encourages the creation of dumb, pliable consumers, churned out to order by the state. Come the revolution...
Vik
Yeah It's hard to believe.
c le/2005/08/30/AR2005083000848.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
TODO create witty sig.
...the Plain Old Telephone System frequently fails in disasters as well!
The article mentions the Emergency Communications Response Vehicles (ECRV) and as someone who has been trained how to operate the systems and vehicle, lemme tell ya, it rocks.
The Excursions were donated by Ford and the labor unions and all the equipment was donated by the manufactures, which means no money donated to the Red Cross via the website or phone bank was used.
The operation is really simple. Pull up to any location that needs external communications, point the dish (all 9 ECRV's and stand alone sat systems share 1 T1's worth a bandwidth - although I'm sure more has been allocated during this disaster). Each ECRV has 10 VoIP phones and 10 laptops with 2 WAPs available to deploy (one is permanently mounted in the truck, the other can be run into a building).
There is also a JPS ACU-1000 cross-connect machine installed that ties all the amateur, FEMA and Red Cross radios together (HF, low band, VHF and UHF are all covered).
Here's some more info on the truck (be kind, they have no idea you're coming).
New Orleanes Registrar vs. Katrina.
DirectNIC.com, a registrar and host which is based in New Orleans, evacuated the majority of their personnel. The skeleton staff that remained spent a great deal of effort battling broken windows, incoming water, and flying debris, from their high-rise office and data center. Their hosting and registration services remained online and worked flawlessly however they are currently running on a back-up diesel generator. From their website "Please understand that with the aforementioned power outage, and the fact that travelling to and from our offices (on the 11th floor) is somewhat restricted, responses
to customer support issues might take a little longer than normal to be addressed...You've
heard of 'bullet-proof hosting'? directNIC.com is now proudly able to prove that their services are literally 'hurricane-proof'."
Their blog
and photos of this event were featured on CNN.
Libertas in infinitum
oh wait, no i can't
anymore !!
Does the FCC require satellite phone services route 9-1-1 dialed calls to the nearest emergency dispatch, a la VoIP and POTS?
The W1AW ham station at ARRL headquarters is testing new BPL equpiment that offers practically no inteference on ham HF bands. See how great things can work when groups learn to work together instead of just pointing their fingers at each other and yelling?
As a HAM with nothing but dialup access easily available, this is greatly encouraging. I just hope that the hams in the gulf states can mobilize quickly to start emergency communications. Fast internet connectivity dosen't seem very important when many people cannot find clean water, food or even dry land.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
That's why Edison's concrete houses didn't sell well.
--
The "are you a script" word for today is dinosaur.
*cough* blizzards *cough*
I live in the south, and any hurricane that reaches where I am is just a heavy thunderstorm. Repeat after me: the entire South is not Florida!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It's obvious most of the poster's don't know much about LAND line networks -----
First of all they're DC powered -- The power from the network comes from an AC powered DC rectifier Plant which is backed up by batteries and in certain cases gas powered generators. This ofcourse depends on the type of telecom site it is: opamp, switch, etc....Most switch sites or Central Offices will have generators and batteries.....
Typically, a network is engineered to operate on standby power a total 8-12hrs via battery back-up - this will vary by telecom company, but that would be typical telecom standard...The land-line communications have historically been the most reliable technical network out there - more than power, cable, etc...
Then you have the issue of how the transmission/switch networks are engineered for avg. demand - which leads to busy signals...They'll typically engineer a Digital Line Carrier(DLC) to have one available line for 1 in every 8 households with service. When there is more than 1 in 8 people trying to use the phone you receive a busy signal...
Cell sites work in the same fashion in terms of avg. demand...Their stand-by power design however is less robust, because the sites are typically smaller, they have less battery back-up - 6hrs or less and usually no dedicated back-up generator - -they will use roll-up generators if any at all...Therefore, they are more likely to lose power and less relible...
Also- if you have a land line phone and use a wireless phone - no power, no phone. The answer is get an analog phone - because it will work in the event of a power outage....unless ofcourse the telephone networks standby has run out of battery power.....
Bottomline - people can't call because the central offices/cell sites are flooded, lost power, ran out of power or lines have been damaged by high winds....
Can't communicate without power - unless it's smoke signals....Chief.
Don't forget the frickin' cold! hehe brrrrrrr
-Xen
Quickly, divert the money for better levees and pumps to more cell phone towers! That will save us!
*pushes up glasses*
"In this age of cheap commoditized consumer electronics and advanced mobile technology"
I think "cheap" may be the operative word...
Steve
Obvious to anyone who gives it 2 seconds of thought is the fact that cell phone carriers do their switching on computer systems which recognize the calling phone. In a disaster condition, when available circuits are overwhelmed, the switching computers are programmed to ignore citizen attempts to complete calls in favor of providing service to designated emergency service provider phones.
Florida: Hurricanes, Fires (rarely) California: Fires, Mudslides, Pacific Cyclones, Earthquakes, etc. Plus, Florida has fewer Californians. FL>CA
"Phone networks are engineered for predicted average demand. This level is occasionally exceeded during regular use. The demand for communications during an event such as hurricane Katrina skyrockets. To build a network capable of satisfying these peak demands would multiply the average user's bill, and few people would sign up."
Gosh darn it. How dare you expose one of slashdot's weak points? Next thing you know, you'll be poking holes in our legal knowledge.
I'm not sure what my friend has, but I've got Sprint PCS (proprietary US service) which got all out of whack because I activated the phone from one area code, but immediately took a vacation and setup the voicemail from another. So the voicemail notification messages kept being sent to the vacation area code for routing by the home address but "home" wasn't there so I never got notified.
The sound of the customer service rep's head bashing against the wall gave me the impression I wasn't the only one who had done this.
Amazingly the internet is one of the few communications links working in the area.
There have been some people posting online from SE Louisiana, and a few web sites located in the area are still up and handling the traffic.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
in the country. You may remember the recent headlines where they finally wired a Lousiana town for POTS service, for the first time. Maybe this will be a wakeup call for some of the officials down there.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
They need to drain the city to get the power back on, they need power to drive the pumps to drain the city...
Actually, many of the pumps are diesel/electric and can use either. They also have tanks of diesel fuel to keep the pumps running for about a week.
I always thought that the biggest hazard to New Orleans was the Mississippi overflowing, since they had two 100-year flood seasons back to back in the last decade.
Actually, that isn't anywhere near the problem it used to be. If the Mississippi gets too high (and we get two weeks notice, as they start to measure water height at Cairo, where the Missouri and Mississppi meet. If the water gets too high, they can route more water into the Atchafalaya (normally 30% of the Mississippi goes into the Atchafalya; they can put up to 60% of the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya before Morgan City has problems), and if they still have too mush water, they open the Bonnet Carré Spillway, which can let up to 40% of the water straight into Lake Pontchartrain.
Instead of trying to retain full voice, wouldn't it be better to just limit none essential mobiles to text? Then the system could survive on far fewer base stations, but retain some communications for all. You can surely get many more text messages through the network than voice.
Ham Radio
Do I even need to say it?
No way dude!
I need my cheap broadband Internet over power lines much more importantly than anyone's disaster communications.
PS: This is brutal sarcasm... for the humor impaired
I am a Ham and just wanted to bluntly get this message accross, since so many Slashdotters always like to dis the Hams every time a new broadband-over-powerlines related story comes out.
Be as blunt as you want, and grab a map while you're at it. Holland is below sea level. Bad place for a country. Some cities in Italy are below sea level. Stupid Italians. How many times have we heard about parts of India getting flooded (usually the poorest parts). Stupid citizens. The fact is that a lot of cities and towns are either below sea level, or in flood plains (Mississippi). While were doing "stupid". How about those places were people live next to a volcano? Or right over a fault line? Stupid humans. Anyone remember "Love Canal"? Stupid humans living on top of that.
--
The "are you a script" word for today is floods.
A peer to peer wireless network would solve everything. If the entire city were connected to wifi, and the city installed an emergy network in which the city could communiate with every single cellphone or wifi device, and every wifi device could communicate with the city, msgs could be transfered in and out. Even if they just upload the msgs to the cities server and then they get forwarded online somewhere, the msgs would get out. People would be able to communicate.
I know, I know, any publicity is good publicity, but what will happen is that the news will report on this company making profit off of others peoples misery and a majority of people will have a negative opinion of said company and possibly take their business elsewhere.
Too many slack-jawed niggers in the south. At least here on the west coast, they're slowly eliminating themselves through shooting eachother, and just generally being stupid niggers.
Really, every place has it's problems, but for the record, the blackout didn't reach chicago.
What about Citizen's Band?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Good thing communications are down, or they'd grab some eDonkey links while they're at it.
...Answer...
Lets see:
The Thelephone Systemm is designed with statistical multiplexing in mind (extremely simplified explanation: the capacity is that of what is expected in the peak hour as an average) but the system is not able to fullfill EVERY SINGLE REQUEST from EVERY SINGLE USER at the same time. For those interested, the capasity is derived from Earlang tables (link for the Danish Matematician: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agner_Krarup_Erlang/ Link for the unit and calculations in telecoms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_unit/)
Mobile systems, being telecom systems, are designed along the same lines, but allowing for mobility. That is why, when there is rush hour, or when there is a concert, or when there are demonstartions (in my country, Venezuela, at least) it was hard to get throug. With Mobile systems, you have two choke points. The antena itself (Called BTS in GSM terms, I will use GSM terminology because I worked for 6 years in various positions and capacities the field), and the switch itself (MSC, again in GSM Terms). Normaly you engineer the system so that the blocking rate due to the MSC is many times lower that the blocking rate due to the BTSs (RF)
If everybody tries to call 911 at the same time, or call their relatives, or receive a call from relatives, the system will not be able to cope. Add to that the fact that many BTSs (and other infrastructure) will be out of service due to the following reasons:
- The Towers/Antenae themselves are damaged
- The tower/antenae are ok, but the Microwave links between them and the MSC (BSCs and transcoders taken into account) are missaligned due to the wind.
- ADSL Links to the BTSs not working.
- Lack of power
- Equipment destroyed (A tree falls on the shellter damaging the electronics, but the antena is ok. It happens. Once One of our BTSs was out because some moron fired at the shelter, and the bullet perforated a Satellite modem).
- et cetera
Now you begin to see the challenge here.
Is not that there is nothing to be done. In GSM you have a copuple of tricks down your Sleeve. First, you can activate a mode known as Half-Rate. This will decrease the datarate of a voicecall, from aprox 13.3Kbps to aprox 6.7Kbps. The voicequality will suffer, but the (remaining) Capacity of the radiofrequency system will be doubled, just like that!.
The second thing that can be done is to put the system in Emergency mode. In this mode, Some calls get priority over the others. That is to say, police, firefigthers, goverment oficials, the phones of the people that work for the operator, and calls alerady stablished to the emergency number (911 in USA, 121 in europe, 127 here in venezuela) get priority over all other calls, allowing the relief personnel to better coordinate their efforts.
I do not know what can be done in the CDMA200 1xRTT world, but I am sure there are some tricks for them as well.
Here in Venezuela (and in Colombia, where I also worked), we have very bad Electrical systems, so many of our BTSs (and all of our BSCs and MSCs) have battery backup power AND motogenerators, giving them an autonomy of Two or more days (until the Diesel fuel dries out). In a situation like that of Katrina, it may not be possible to replenish the fuel. But to make it worse, in america the electric system is so good, that is dificult to justify the use of motogenerators in the BTSs themselves, but just in critical pieces of equipment. So, after some hours, is goodbye to the cell system. The MSC may Still work, and the BSCs. The SMSs that your family sends you from the other side of the globe will be received, and will be stored in the SMSC server, but will not get to you because there will be no towers on. GAME OVER.
So, is not the ubiquity of the equipment, but a design focused on availability and disaster handling that will allow you to be able to stay comunicated during time
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
http://gets.ncs.gov/
This is what the infamous 710 area code is for.
I don't know how well it actually works or if it is being used for this disaster.
Anyone know if it was used on 9/11?
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Silicon Valley did OK in the 1989 M6.9 Loma Prieta Earthquake. There were power outages and work holidays the first couple of days. However the InterNet and computers were mostly up the day after. I was sending emails and get earthquake data across the InterNet the following day. The graphical world wide web was not yet operational in the 1980s, so mostly was ftps, usenet and email.
The 1989 was considered a medium-large quake. The Maximum quake could be as much as 1.3 magnitudes high and about fifty times more energetic.
A hurricane is different. Its harder for electrical networks to stay operation during large scale flooding. Likewise, the storm that hit New Orleans is by no means the largest possible.
Shame I don't have moderator points; you're spot-on.
And other geek goodies at electronics stores throughout the greater New Orleans area!
Put your waders on and hurry!
This is a LIMITED TIME OFFER!
Tomorrow the police and National Guard start shooting!
Remember the /. story a while back where AT & T was dumping those squat microwave towers? They were designed to withstand a near atomic blast, weren't they?
Seems kinda silly to not have continued to use those, especially in areas where Mother Nature tends to be a bit vindictive.
Did anyone read Allen Steele's Jericho Iteration? I just got his weird feeling that NO could turn out like St Louis in the book. Refugees stuck for months on end, a wide division between haves and have nots, heavy-handed government and police tactics.
As the TV show said, we have the technology. It's a business decision how to deploy it. Can you run your business by having enough capacity for rare peak demand? Probably not. In the 2003 blackout, cellphones failed not because of the electricity outage but because people saturated the network. Such events happen rarely. Presumably those who really need to communicate (ie emergency services) in those situations have the means to do so outside of commercial channels. For private companies, it may not be reasonable or possible to accomodate the event when EVERYONE is dialing at the same time.
This is not limited to natural disasters and other such situations. I have a beach house. When the weather is not so nice, my cellphone works fine there. When it's beautiful, it doesn't work so well because a large amount of people have flooded to the beach and there isn't enough local capacity for them. Why people are yammering away on the beach instead of enjoying themselves is beyond me. Or maybe they just have a boss like me.
Mock Tech Interviews & Free Resume Review
Try GOOGLE JABBER. It is proactively ENHANCED with the exciting new technology ADWORDS. You can use it with your APPLE aqua blue dildo shaped ICOCK music player/cell phone. Don't get slack, get COCKED while sipping your LATTE while your PREGNANT wife holds a KNIFE to your THROAT. OMG, the BLOGOSPHERE just had a COREDUMP all over my PODCAST.
on 20 Meters. See http://www.hwn.org/
when did the red cross become hightech?
A couple months ago on Slashdot there was a story about a concrete and steel house in Florida whose owner claimed it was hurricane-proof. I wonder if he had a chance to find out?
Because of the coverage in cell towers, many people were able to continue to communicate during the storm. In fact, many people were using the SMS system to communicate.
THey also mentioned that the Internet functioned remarkably well, as it has the capabilities to route communications around trouble areas. Not sure what they were referring to, but it was brought up.
The military has easily deployable satellite communication equipment. Effective communication is critical in terms of responding to this type of disaster.
Because the domestic communication infrastructure is not designed to handle this type of disaster we are forced to rely on Helicopters, Watercrafts and National Guard to gain access to the affected areas.
I am sure that there are deployable Cell Towers with Satellite uplinks. Where is this equipment? Where is the expertise to quickly deploy it?
I am tired of the sugar coating I hear on CNN, Fox News etc. Having the military commanders on the major news channels discussing how they have all the manpower and equipment they need to respond to the disaster is bullshit.
With so many National Guard and emergency equipment over seas, was the United States prepared for this disaster?
The networks are not designed for theoretical maximum capacity, they are designed for average peak observed capacity.
.00001 percent or lower probability of certain types of failures. (I don't recall if that includes the probability of a particular call failing to go thorugh, but they try to keep that low, too. A bigger concern is to keep calls that went through from dropping off...)
Actually they're designed for "five nines" - a
They do plan to have enough extra capacity to handle peaks - like MINOR disasters, traffic jams, and various events that both knock out some of their equipment and get lots of people calling at the same time.
But trying to put in enough stuff to handle the sinking of a city the size of New Orleans by a hurricaine, which also knocks down towers, floods equipment rooms, curbside boxes, and other infrastructure, breaks cables and fibers in many places simultaneously, smashes buildings - including switching centers, drops ALL power so ALL equipment is running on backup for weeks, etc., while simultaneously putting EVERYBODY on the phone, is beyond the pale.
As with California earthquakes, the surviving equipment tries to meter the remaining capacity by such measures as "slow dialtone". But some people are going to get cut off completely, and some may be delayed fatally. Can't be helped.
But it has always been this way, or even more so: Kennedy assassination took out the phone service country-wide as EVERYBODY tried to call someone to talk about it. (Main thing I remember about the assasination was the phone failure.) Storms - even a small tornado - would short enough wires to make enough phones look "off-hook" to tie up all the line-finders, and with the calls handled by relays rather than computers the line-finders would STAY on the shorted lines until a human arrived to intervene, hours later. So nobody real got a dialtone. And so on.
And imagine what it was like when calls were placed by operators - with several parties on most linse and a limited number of cables in the switchboard to connect lines - when everybody wanted to call at once.
Or before phones...
Trust me, it's a LOT better now than ever before.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
amen
This guy is blogging from the DirectNIC datacenter in downtown New Orleans. Amazingly, they're still up. He seems to be having a hard time looking for diesel fuel. And then he starts talking about "survivalist hygiene"... He seems serious (to the point of being crazy) about staying there for the long haul.
This is the downside of price-based competition.
When access devices are cheap, they break easily - but that's okay, because they're easy to replace. 1,000 people each replacing a $100 item is an easy decision.
When infrastructure is (relatively) cheap, it breaks easily - and that's bad. To service those same 1,000 people, you need one company to justify spending $100,000. Much less likely to happen in a hurry, especially if the company was just scraping by... errr... highly competitive... to begin with.
Of course, if they'd done it right the first time, and paid a 10% premium up front, there wouldn't have been such a big problem - but from a cashflow perspective it's better to upset 0.01% of your customers for a month every year than it is to have 10% less market coverage.
With each breath in, a flower somewhere opens; with each breath out, a flower withers away. In between lies beauty.
Communications networks are designed to handle the average traffic load. Shortly after any natural disaster, almost everybody in the country calls into the affected region, ensuring several times the maximum design load, so very few people actually get through. Hopefully, they've gotten a little bit smarter; after Loma Prieta nobody could call out on a cell phone because the phone network delay to get a dial tone increased to the point where the cell sites would simply give up and fail the call every time. (Hopefully they're using an adjustable timeout now). Also, after any disaster, a good portion of the working lines are reserved for emergency services, making it that much harder for anybody else to get through. If you really want to be able to communicate after a disaster, I'd suggest getting a HAM license.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Here is a link to some good information on the IT related aspects of relief being provided by the Red Cross to the New Orleans area.
and will continue to, at least until BPL destroys all HF communications. http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2005/08/30/1/?nc= 1
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The infrastructure isn't geared to anywhere near 100% usage -- even with all of the equipment intact and the power running. I don't even think land line telephone service would be able to take care of nearly everyone wanting to call 911 or a relative.
I'd doubt any company executive would want to explain to the shareholders why they have enough towers and switches and computers to handle every subscriber using their phones when the percentage 99% of the time is a lot less than 100%.
Plus more capacity equals more towers equals more resistance to the towers (NIMBY).
Can anyone find statistics that say what kind of usage the cell companies expect?
-- I browse at +5 with stripped sigs
A friend of mine has family in New Orleans, and while the phones were down, they were able to keep contact by text messaging eachother from their cell phones. Not sure why this worked, but it did...
The problem lies in things like not having a proper power backup like a generator to keep services functioning when power goes out. Buried leased lines don't usually get taken out during hurricanes so if you have a power supply you can still communicate.
Our business was taken out for 24 hours during Katrina because we have no generator. If we had we could have gone back to work on Friday morning and not missed a beat. The T1 lines had link and the battery on the alarm kept functioning but without even floodlights or our main servers powered there's nothing much we can do here.
I know that this idea will never be prevailant (because the cell phone companies are the ones that drive the mobile comm market and they want you to bill time on their network), but I think that technology will soon be at a point where P2P cell phones would be more effective and robust. Think of GNU The Onion Router or Freenet style networking with on-the-fly anonymous peering.. only in hardware with blazingly fast spread spectrum transmission.
My original post called for unit to unit text messaging services to be built. Text services! Not for the cell companies to connect millions of phone calls at a time.
How about p2p telephony like I believe the US army uses in Iraq? The more callers, the better...
To be truthful, things like cell phones, wireless data networks, and satellite links are luxuries in any time or circumstance. All a human needs is food, water, and shelter, right? So why does anyone have a cell phone or computer?
Speed and accuracy.
Moving rescue personnel, evacuees, water, food, medicine, and other supplies around is a logistics nightmare. Especially when the roads and airports are covered in debris. Coordinating everything, and getting it out there before the victims die of exposure, is exactly the sort of things communications and computers are built for. Only here, it's lives on the line instead of money.
Ham radio is great, but just try keeping up-to-date supply inventories using pencil and paper. Or keeping a conversation confidential, so that a hungry mob doesn't swarm the relief trucks before they get to the distribution point.
it may have happened, OTOH, in any great disaster strike, many 'fantastic' tales get circulated that turn out to not be true.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But not to you, Mr. Asshole. To you, its THEIR fault this happened. Its my grandmothers fault that her house is under water right now (which is why I am so mad at your heartless comment). I mean 40 years ago she COULD have bought it somewhere else, except for the fact that my grandfather's job was in New Orleans and they didn't have the means to live else where. But no, you are right, its her fault.
This shit makes me sooo mad. And to see such cold tripe modded up....sad day...
Open Source Sushi
It seems that you can get one or two watts of transmitter to go amazing distances if you know a little antennae theory and know how to lay your hands on a reel of coax cable.
Long-wires, capacity hats, incredible things like directional-discontinuity ring radiators, very high tech that can be built with a few iron fence stakes and a bit of wire and a good head for geometry.
Astoundingly powerful communications technology for an extremely accessible cost. If you want to know more get an old ARRL handbook. Sort of like the older Boy Scout Handbooks from back in the days when they were useful, but cover all the basics of home-brew transmitters. Get one.
One of the problems ham radio faces in times of cataclysmic storm is the shape of the ionosphere at the time and place. It's used as a signal reflector. On good days you can whisper from Maine to Tokyo on a watt. On bad days, you can't punch through with 50MW unless you have line of sight.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
http://www.wwltv.com/ (a New Orleans TV station) is webcasting live streaming video of their newsfeed, and http://www.somethingawful.com/ (a very large humor website & forum), which is hosted in downtown NO, is still operational. I guess that in this case the Internet is working as designed, and routing around damaged nodes (however I've heard the bandwidth in and out of NO is much lower than normal due to damaged/destroyed/inoperable routers, switches, cables, etc.).
What if this signature were clever?
Back in the late seventies and early eighties, Gerard K. O'Neill, famous for the development of the idea of orbital space habitats, made the rounds of the government and corporate powers to strongly propose the idea of the satellite phone. He wanted to have a profit-making reason to go into space to realize his dreams.
The prototype phone he showed around was about the size of a cellular handset you could buy today.
O'Neill's project never made it out of the gate. Too expensive for a private company to make, and we are all about private companies.
Bill Gates famously put some of his cash into a six billion dollar venture called Iridium which actually still functions. At least, unless they've deorbitted due to budget woes. They went bankrupt, and the US government picked it up for pennies on the dollar. That's one way of getting a cheap satphone system.
America and the rest of the planet went a different route, for purely business reasons. It was more profitable to roll out cellular coverage in stages, as customers could be found to pay the bills. They make fabulous amounts of money.
But as we see today in New Orleans, although cell phones passed the money test, they've utterly failed to support their users. People are dying out there because the cheap, easy-to-build cell towers are powerless and flooded.
Sometimes, and I can't see how much more forcefully a point can be made than an entire region falling out of communication, engineering for critical infrastructure should NOT BE LEFT SOLEY TO THE FREE MARKET.
The military is flying in satphones so that rescuers and cops can finally talk to each other.
Iridium, or a successor should be government subsidized, expanded, and maintained as a national security asset. Screw the cell phone companies. Screw the billionaires. Make a national phone company, like the post office. Let it operate independently, for profit, but chartered to provide service for all, from the satellites in the sky, at subidized prices. Priority for disasters. We need this. It is not an optional extra for civilization.
I know someone who can't rest because a relative was driving north on I-10 and hasn't been heard from in over two days. He should be able to phone. A prison has rioted, and no one can get through to find out what's going on.
If we can spend a trillion- yes, after it is over, a trillion will be spent-- on this war in Iraq, we can spend a few measly billion dollars a year in perpetuity to make sure this infrastructure failure never happpens again.
Libertarians, this one's for you. A lesson in humility and sanity. Government is sometimes the only solution.
A large chunk of the broadband infrastructure has been destroyed. The company I work for has been offline for two days. About the only company in our area (Northwest Louisiana) that can give us service close to equal of that to a T1 is Time Warner, but it will take 30-45 days for them to get us back online. We were supposed to be back online with Bell South on Thursday, but their data center in New Orleans got taken out this morning when another levy broke.
Right now, the only connection I have is dialup.
Karma: Positive. Mostly effected by cowbell.
Dont worry. NateTech and all the other 60+ year old Ham radio men will be out there doing Morse Code. The only problem is, no one will be able to understand them. Well, Nate, this is the best opportunity you cw hypers have to prove you're right and show the nefarious FCC they're wrong. 88
UWB uses a large range of frequencies, frequencies that companies have paid a large amount of money for. UWB claims that it's such a low power that it won't interfere with these frequencies or it'll use other ones, though. If you're Sprint and you shell out a ton of cash for a freq range, you don't want other system using it (even if you're not, at the moment).
So it's probably a big politics game right now, although I think UWB has a lot of potential.
---John Holmes...
"Listen, lad. I built this city up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other mayors said I was daft to build a city on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest city in the land."
I just recieved reports that New Oreleans trunked 800 MHz trunked system failed. Ham radio operators are pretty much standing by waiting to get into the city. People are being evacuated from the city and the last thing they would do is let hams go in. I have been listening to the Hurricane Net and am really amazed by all the work they and the SATERN guys are doing. Good luck to all of them.
www.kb3juv.com
Phone systems, for example, are designed to handle a particular load. That load is "a small percentage of all customers simultaneously." So if you have an area with 100,000 people, maybe you can handle 10,000 simultaneous phone calls in an exchange. It's generally not worth the 10x increase in cost just to be able to handle worst-case scenarios. And really, it's not like emergency services will be able to deal with even 10,000 calls at once.
This is a good reason that the cellular companies need to re-instate the Local Access Numbers (or Roamer Access Numbers depending who you ask)
It's the system that was used when all the local cellular systems were independant. If you were roaming, people had to know where you were and call a phone number there. They would then enter your phone number (MIN) and your cellular phone would ring.
I continued using the system for quite some time after roaming call delivery was implemented. It was a handy way for people from the area you were in to call you without you or them having to pay long distance fees. (After the so called follow-me roaming was implemented, I would get calls from people where I was, paying long distance to my home area, while I was paying long distance from my home area. This was before everyone had free long distance)
In the post-weather calm, when people can get back in to search for survivors and review the damage, why not deploy mobile trucks that have generators. These units could deploy tethered weather balloons that hold aloft temporary cell sites.
Cell sites get knocked down and/or damaged in a weather event like this. Emergency Services deploys weather balloon toting trucks afterwards to provide extended cell/radio coverage, thus temporarily restoring communications for survivors.
Or has this already been done?
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
We are still using a client-server model for communications.
We need a new p2p based mobile voice technology. We have all these low power devices (cell phones) that can both send and recieve data, why not use this capability to devise a self healing mesh network? Are there technological hurdles to this method?
Who do I have to blackmail to get some representation around here!?!?!?!?
Blizzards you say?
A roof steeply sloped to prevent snow build-up
an adequate supply of firewood/food/water
no trees withing falling distance of the house.
Anything else I need be worried about? Not to say bad things can't happen, but the vast bulk of things are able to be prepared for in advance.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
well I didn't want to be cocky and just say NY ;-) I'm originally from Rochester and to my knowledge no significant hurricane effects have ever really been felt there.
We had a massive ice storm back in '89 I think...but with proper planning you can 'weather' that just fine.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
This is just a brief thought, and I'm sure there are dozens of holes you can poke in the idea, but there must be some way to get something like this working to create an ad-hoc network with such powerful little devices.
After you donate to any charity you choose why not make your next vacation to a spot hit hard by the storm?
Take your business meeting there, family trip or day trip to a place who has had to rebuild and spend a few dollars there. The people need outside economic stimulation - for years. If you can't make up your mind on where to visit next summer, pick a town who is just starting to rebuild and show your support.
and spare us the comments on the obvious reasons why a few obvious places aren't going to be a choice
Get your Unix fortune now!
- Why can't the system not fail in an event that releases around 200 times as much energy as the human species produces electricity?
- Why can't the system not fail in the face of an event with an energy release roughly equivalent to a 10 megaton bomb every 10 minutes?
And those seem to be estimates for "typical" hurricanes, so they might undershoot the power of a category 4 storm...First of all, the governer(s) should've declared marshall law in these areas.
;-)
Then they could've commendered these trains BY FORCE if needed. That would've been a very simple solution to that problem.
Here is a bad joke.
What do you call Amtrak getting lifted off the tracks into the air by a hurricane? Valujet
More seriously now...
About the current situation - how are they going to evac 30,000 people from the Superdome?
- There are no roads in.
- You cannot get a boat much larger than '15 person' capacity in the vicinity
- Helicopters only hold 5-7 people
Any ideas?
Libertas in infinitum
New Orleans is a cesspool of scum, filth, disease, and rotting corpses....then the hurricane blew in. ;-)
(sorry, I couldn't resist..Lord I apologize, please forgive me and be with the starving pygmies down in New Guniea)
Libertas in infinitum
Given that there is NOTHING our current technology can do to stop this from happening again, I would be VERY suprised if ANYONE could get insurance inside this city ever again.
I would love to read a risk-based analysis of this situation and what the predictions of the future are.
Also the government would not be wise to allow people to rebuild in the same areas inside the city. If the city doesn't go bankerupt after this I'll be suprised. Therefore, the most logical policy for the government would be to not authorize any new development or zoning inside the "flood bowl".
Libertas in infinitum
I have always wondered why no one uses balloons for communication. The concept of using zeppelins to provide high ground antenna arrays for mobile communication has already been established.
In cases of catastrophes this could be useful. It might take to long to fly a zeppelin in there (like the tsunami in Asia) but you might fly a balloon there and send it up. It might even be tied to the ground with a mile long cable that would provide it with a range of several miles, enough to cover a large city in the case of a terror attack like 9/11 or an earth quake. The cable could also provide power from a ground based generator.
It should provide antennas for mobile phones, simply because this is a well known technology. We should not start to invent new radios etc. but might simply equipped every rescue member with a mobile (they probably already have one). There might be an issue in regards to charging the batteries, but that might be fixed.
At the same time, using mobile phones, would allow those trapped in the zone to communicate. You might choose to limit the communication to SMS or something similar in order to save bandwidth (unless you were a rescue worker).
Simple and effective. I just wonder why it is not allready done...
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
I suppose when they are under water they don't work very well.
What a stupid thread!
This is just utter ignorance on your part. I work for the only company in Canada licenced to operate residential BBPL service. I also happen to have a no-code tech. licence. I can tell you with 100% certanty that our equipment does not interfear with ham radio services. We use BBPL repeaters to provide high speed service to the utility poles and use standard 801.11b for the last mile service into homes. We had to go through hell and back to get the CRTC to licence us because of concerns about cross talk on ham bands but this issue is now a dead one as its been shown that it does not interfeer with ham and aproval has alreay been given. The proof is in the pudding, all my repeaters are showing as up and working, and your still able to use your radio. Where is this RF polution you speak of? I would like to hear about it.
-- Please insert another quarter
The Red Cross say they are launching their "biggest-ever natural disaster effort". So... how much effort exactly did they put into the tsunami relief, where hundreds of thousands died, as opposed to a hundred or so. Oh wait, they're Americans, of course. But seriously, where was all this high tech communications equipment when communications were knocked out across most of South Asia (and barely restored now)? Mississippi isn't all that big, when you think about it.
So billions being spent on HLS, just in case one nutcase nukes a city... (only govt agents do those things) While $$ spent on real mobile networks that wont die in hurricanes... $0
PRICELESS.... well the price is our lives and taxes for those morons in charge.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
There's a blimp constructed to be able to increase GSM-coverage in disaster areas tested today(!) above the ESRANGE rocket launch site in northern Sweden.
;)3 60
I've got a link in, but only in Swedish though
http://svt.se/svt/jsp/Crosslink.jsp?d=22620&a=441
Wow! You violated the laws of physics, and prevented a system that was never designed to carry communications signals from radiating interferance into the air.
yeah!
that story aside, there is no absolutes when plotting the path of a hurricane. remember if you evacuate people, you have to move them somewhere... and you may be moving them right into the path of the storm. Amtrak trains would be a very slow way to do mass evacuations of a whole region.... and the trains have limited directions they can go. didn't you ever see a Godzilla movie? the people on the trains ALWAYS get it.
there is also the case of many people not wanting to leave. in a way i could see their thinking. people did not expect this kind of devastation. people have a habit of recalling the worst storm they remember and figure "i survived that". they also fear leaving all their possessions to looters or whatever.
not just blimps but there have been those tests of drone aircraft that can relay communications (phone and internet) to the ground. the planes they are working on could stay aloft for weeks at a time, they are almost gliders and have solar panels on their wings. if i remember right one of them was called Helios and used a Mac Tibook (because of its weight).
this seems to be a perfect case for drones or blimps. they are saying it may take a month to fully drain the city, THEN they start cleaning up THEN they start rebuilding the power, communications, water etc services. it is going to take a long time to rebuild and having some form of communication up would be a boost... even if it is a drone that can be a repeater for proprietary walkie-talkies.
those had multiple purposes including being able to fly over an area like this and bring up some degree of cell service (or military use to fly over a battlefield kind of area possibly). while you may not think that matters, it would be a big help to rescue workers. they could also work as radio towers for walkie talkies. right now they have to use satellite phones.
the military use has limitations, but there are a slew of ideas on how to set up a communications grid for soldiers (including them dropping little repeaters and using a network of them back to base). Wired has had stories about the ideas. i guess the thinking is that if the military likes your idea and throws you cash it is very lucrative, and you will have tons of R&D funding.... with the trickle down technology making it to the public in some form.
I can't speak for the cell phone companiies but I used to work for Nortel. They kept tractor trailers full of equipment ready to roll. Last disaster I heard about the telephone company that serviced the area couldn't get their regular supplier to commit to anything less than 6 weeks, we had an emergency CO up and running in three days.
I don't know if they still do that or not but at the time it made me proud. It prbably also made the marketing department's year.
Holy crap, think about what you're saying.
- Cell phones NEED cell towers to operate. They are not walkie talkies.
- Cell towers need equipment to process and route calls. This equipment is under 20 feet of water.
- This equipment also needs power to run. The power cables and stations are under 20 feet of water.
- Mobile devices also fall prey to wind. Not many poles and towers can stand sustand winds of 140+ MPH.
The number one misunderstanding that people have about communications (mobile or land based) is that it will be available in an emergency. You would think that after 100 years of the opposite that they would learn. There is no guarantee that your cell phone will work in perfect weather, let alone in a hurricane. Have you ever tried to make a cell phone call at a sporting event with over 50,000 people in the same place? Good luck getting through.
Even using portable cell towers won't work if the rest of the infrastructure is severely damaged.
-Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
My company is currently deploying a series of meshed IP networks in order to interconnect several emergency operation centers and mobile command centers in the field. This network will be used by response personel for Voice, Video and, Data. We are linking several VSAT base stations together (providing internet and local applications along the wireless network) to create VPN access points and Exported IP Video broadcasting of several areas to be made available on the web to response agencies. Here is press release: For Immediate Release F4W provides Tactical Wireless Emergency Phone and Internet services for areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina Rapid Deploy Tactical Network provides mission critical law enforcement application support and Internet connectivity to support the relief efforts of the Hillsborough County (Florida) Sheriffs' Mobile Command Center. Lake Mary, FL - August 30, 2005--F4W, a leading developer of Tactical Wireless Solutions for public safety, emergency response and Homeland Security announced the deployment of the Tactical Wireless Emergency Broadband Network (TWEB(TM)) to assist disaster relief efforts in the hardest hit areas of Mississippi. Fire, rescue and law enforcement agencies from all over the country have responded with equipment and personnel to assist the areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina. F4W will deploy a TWEB network that provides secure wireless internet and phone service to multiple Mobile Command Centers and patrol vehicles from the various responding agencies. Additionally, F4W will deploy a Wireless Emergency Broadband Video (WEBVTM) network to provide wireless surveillance video of key intersections, staging areas and food distribution centers. "The tactical nature of this technology allows us to offer services not possible with other wireless or wired networks. We are able to deploy a network that covers several miles in a matter of hours, as was demonstrated by our deployment last year after hurricane Charley" said Harry Timmons, President of F4W. F4W's TWEB VoIP networks are a rapidly deployable wireless communication system designed to provide secure phone services. TWEB's feature Motorola, Tachyon and Panasonic equipment and F4W control software and network devices to provide phone and data service at key locations, in moving patrol vehicles and even watercraft securely at high speeds. TWEB networks are much less expensive than traditional voice and Internet solutions, and can be easily reconfigured as a users needs change. Allan Edwards CEO of F4W said,"In an area of vast devastation with no traditional phone lines, cell phone or public safety radio services, the F4W TWEB network will provide critical communications for relief agencies and a lifeline from the disaster area to the outside world. F4W will do everything possible to extend these services wherever they are needed." About Freedom 4 Wireless Based in Lake Mary, Florida, F4W is a developer of proprietary 4th Generation Mobile Broadband Wireless Services applications and products. F4W's unique tactical network products for Public Safety and Vertical Industries create mobile ad hoc networks designed for specific use and function. These self-forming networks and unique collaboration software provide secure, simple to use networks that provide real-time video, VoIP, and data services to users wherever they are, whenever they need it. 2 F4W is providing Tactical Wireless Emergency Broadband(TM) solutions for Homeland Security, First Responders and Law Enforcement Agencies. TWEB provide instant broadband data communications for tactical emergency response teams who need self forming, self healing networks. The users literally become the network; F4W tactical solutions can provide instant broadband communications without the need for a fixed infrastructure. Freedom 4 Wireless' solutions revolutionize the way Homeland Security, Law Enforcement and Emergency Responders access critical information and communicate, real-time, even while traveling a high speeds. Tactical Wireless Emergency Broadband, Video Wireless E
What happened in New Orleans is a tragedy and the people there do need help. But let's not forget the people of Florida who have not yet recovered from last years 4 hurricanes. They need as much help today as they did before Katrina. Don't send all the funds to New Orleans Peter Kuhn Lakeland Florida doublewidetrailer@gmail.com