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. "

Comments

Red Cross Donations

[learn fast]

https://www.redcross.org/donate/donation-form.asp

1-800-HELP-NOW

Ham Radio

[BenFranske]

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.

Round up of New Orleans News Sources

[Cr0w T. Trollbot]

• Nola.com: Good news source.
• New Orleans LiveJournal Bloggers
• Long, devestating helicopter flyover of the disaster. (Someone grab a mirror of this, as it's long and will certainly be swamped. And that was before the worst of the flooding had arrived.)
• Yahoo's photo roundup.

-Crow T. Trollbot

amateur radio is alive and well in New Orleans

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Simple

[Have Blue]

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.

Re:Windy

[AlexisMachine]

Wind no, rain yes.

Ku Band singals are in the microwave range of EM frequencies, so are vulnerable to rain fade (which is ironic since many Meteorologists get their data this way).

C-Band isn't as bad.

Flooding

[ackthpt]

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.

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.

Re:Dumbass question

[Lost Found]

Eh... all true, but the battery part. At least, I'm making an educated guess. Here in Telecom Corridor in Richardson, TX, Nortel's facility has (or at least, at one time, had) battery capacity to run Dallas for a week, and they don't even switch calls... just make switches.

Of course, that is the PSTN, and I suppose cell providers aren't held to nearly the same standard.

Re:Money to be made here

[nekonoko]

We already have this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_On_Wheels

/. has been watching too much mass media

[thesandbender]

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.

Re:/. has been watching too much mass media

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not debating any of your other points, because they're all valid and well thought out in my opinion, but...

if you'll sign the 10 year $250/month service contract

Contracts are a method not to ensure income for the service but to force customers to pay more for the service than the service is worth. Wireless companies already have a captive audience, to the tune of hundreds of millions of customers. They already make obscene amounts of money and were they not so driven by personal greed and profit there's the chance their infrastructure would be able to withstand these problems. The networks have the capacity problems that they have not because it's not possible but because it would affect the personal profits of the persons that run these companies, either by hitting the company (and thus shareholders') bottom line or because the pay of executives is tied to the corporation's profits. Whatever the twist, wireless companies care about profit, not about reliability or functionality or anything else. Coincidentally they may care about those things, but it's profit profit profit first.

I guess my question is, whatever happened to good citizenship and being a beneficial, constructive part of society instead of a leech of money?

Wireless phones have become commoditized and I'm surprised people don't tend to expect them to work the same way land-line phones, electricity and water work. They're utilities, everyone has them, they're dirt cheap and the people got together to use our collective power and legislative influence to require the costs to be low and to recognize them as basic services that 100% of people should receive (though we accept lower percentages as a way of being reasonable).

People can point and shout and call me a communist until they're red in the face, but as long as we let companies divide and milk us we'll never move beyond this paradigm. What have phone companies promised that they deliver? Digital services? Great, so now instead of my phone fading out but having clear voice services it cuts o t at r ndom t mes com lete y and sounds like it was compressed with lossy compression and decompressed ten times along the way. 3G? I'm still waiting for 3G services from my provider. When they do manage to do something right, like move their phone services onto their Internet networks, it never results in tangible benefits for customers. I don't know about you, but since I've had a wireless phone the cost per month has only gone up and the quality of customer service and wireless service has gone down.

I don't know about the rest of you, but if it comes down to Sprint making another twenty million dollars next month and fixing the problems with their networks and capacity, I'm all for the part that benefits people and not corporations.

Re:/. has been watching too much mass media

[tzanger]

Actually it's all the rain that's in the distance between the satellite and the dish reflector itself that kills the signal. The small space between the reflector and the LNB is where the signal's strongest. And the "socks" are there to keep snow, squirrels, birds, etc. from collecting in that small space and absorbing the faint signals.

Re:/. has been watching too much mass media

[pyser]

if rain travels between the dish itself and the "stalk" pointing at the dish, then your signal will degrade

The "stalk" is called the feed assembly. Old timers like me still call it the "feed horn". In most satellite receive systems, it contains the actual receive antenna (usually a horn-coupled waveguide) and a preamplifier and frequency converter commonly called a "LNB" (low-noise block converter).

Heavy rain affects Ku-band satellite signals by attenuating them as they make their way through the area of rain near the surface. The signal can also be scattered somewhat by the rain but it is not as significant a phenomenon as rain attenuation. Here is a good explanation of rain fade.

I've seen rain fade affect terrestrial microwave links as well. I once lost a 13-GHz link for about 10 minutes when a heavy rain storm moved into the path between the transmitter and receiver. The fade margin on that link was around 30 dB, so the rain cut the signal to less than one-thousandth of what it was. I've also seen C-band rain fade, but this was on a very-small-aperture (1-meter) dish which has just enough gain to get the signal it's supposed to get.

"dish socks" stretchy covers that go over the dish. It keeps rain from passing through the dish and the LNB.

These are actually covers that primarily prevent snow from accumulating in the dish and spoiling the parabola, greatly reducing the antenna gain and consequently the recovered signal strength. Other methods of accomplishing this are a non-stick coating applied to the dish so that the snow slides off, and heating systems, either heat tapes applied to the surface or hot-air systems, which blow heated air into cavities behind the dish panels. The latter is most often used on uplinks, where a change in gain and directivity could mistakenly illuminate other satellites.

Re:Ham Radio

[wowbagger]

Well, then do it - the test for No Code Tech is not very hard, and then you can start getting practice operating, and start studying for the Extra when the FCC removes the 5 words per minute Morse requirement (any day now).

Go to http://www.arrl.org/ - download the question pools (they are about to change - so get the correct ones), go by a shi^H^H^HRadio Shack and get the Tech, General, and Extra study guides, and spend a few minutes a night studying.

The ARRL should have a list of testing sessions and locations - failing that, let me know where you are and I'll see what I can find out.

HAMS: Help Needed!

[SonicSpike]

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

Re:Money to be made here

[Incadenza]

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.

You mean like COLTs (Cell on Light Trucks)? This seems like prior art to me:

Rapid Disaster Response - COLTs
Verizon Wireless "Cell on Light Trucks" (COLTs) can process thousands of calls every hour in the event cell sites or other key communications equipment are damaged or disabled by a community disaster. The 25,000 pound vehicle features two retractable masts, a microwave antenna to link network components, an emergency power generator and a small office. The COLT is also fully equipped with resources needed during emergencies including equipment, fuel, electrical generators, food, water and cots.

Re:Money to be made here

[dougmc]

It seems like Verizon, Sprint or someone could make a boatload of money from opportunities like this.

Ok, let's assume that Verizon has a fleet of mobile cell towers with generators, solar powered blimp repeaters, etc. all ready to go to New Orleans on a moment's notice.

In order to make a boatload of money, somebody would have to pay for it. Who would pay?

Sure, the service would be worth paying for, but Verizon would immediately be accused of price gouging if they tried to actually get somebody to pay for it. Everybody would expect the `enhanced' service to be provided for free.

How would you react if you were a Verizon customer and your phone, which hadn't worked before, rang, and it was Verizon offering to make your phone work again for the next three days for only $29.95? Just give your credit card! It might be a bargain, it might even save your life and many other lives, but the outcry against it would be enormous.

I do see how this would be useful, but unless the governments have already made some sort of deal to fund this sort of thing in advance, I don't see where a boatload of money could be made. In fact, all I see is an opportunity to provide service for free -- which gets them a lot of good karma and brownie points, but it's often hard to take that to the bank.

Re:I've got a friend

[VoiceOfSanity]

This is unfortunately true. The reason for this is simple: The network tries to route the call first to the area code where the cell phone was registered. Seeing it listed as 504 (for New Orleans) causes the system to try and go to New Orleans first to see if it can connect. With the existing network in tatters the response back is a failure, which instead of making the call do a search to see where the phone is, gets routed to either a message saying 'all circuits are busy' or 'due to the hurricane in the area, your call cannot be completed.'

I talked with a Cingular tech, and he says that the situation is that they are trying to set up the network to find the phone anywhere, but it may be some time before they have it up and running. I'm sure that other cell phone companies are rushing to do the same, so that they can provide connectivity to those who have fled the area and need to call folks to let them know they're alive and safe.

212 Calling 504

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Re:Red Cross runs IT now?

[Fubar]

The cell phone is a luxury right now; a dry place to sleep is the real need.

The Red Cross is bringing in telcom equipment to not only provide an outside link to those affected by the disaster, but to also coordinate the RC's response to this disaster.

Each service center and shelter needs comms back to their assigned HQ which also needs comms to other HQ's and to the National HQ in Washington D.C. How do you do that in areas which have had their infrastructure wiped out? You bring it with you.

That is why the Red Cross is deploying their ECRVs (mentioned in the article) and "Fly Away Kits" which provide stationary sat comms.

This is not about giving people cell service (something the Red Cross isn't equipped for), this is about creating a lifeline to the rest of the world using satellite links and VoIP.

This is a silly question that requires a profound

[williamyf]

...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

Technology is secondary

[mr.warmth]

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.

Re:Cellular blimps

[malakai]

Well, while Amtrak is not a government agency, it is wholly owned ( 100% of it's stock is owned by the Federal government ) so I'm going to call BS on this story. It would have taken two phone calls MAX from a Lousianna Senator to allow Amtrak trains to be commendeered for evacutation.

My guess is, they didn't feel the need for it. As they knew the capactity of the Superdome + the nine orther emergency locations would not be exceeded. In fact, in the end, only about 10k went to the Superdome. It can hold 80k for an event.

That may turn out to be a bad decision, but not because people couldn't get Amtrak to play ball. The board is federally controlled, and they require the US Federal Governemnt to approve their budget each year. The US Govt has Amtrak by the balls, for better or worse.

Re:Windy

[negative3]

While theoretically UWB can support an incredible data rate, in practice it's not possible. In my graduate research group (mprg.org) a whole group of people are studying UWB propagation, receiver structures, etc. To actually get the theoretical throughput, you need an incredible amount of power - because W/Hz is part of Shannon's capacity theorem. Even though the signal power spectral density is low and can hopefully blend in with the noise floor of any other receiver, the transmitter has to have a very powerful amplifier because it's power is going to be spread over a huge bandwidth. I'm not trying to be argumentative, I just wanted to bring up something a few of us discussed on a boring night at the lab this summer. People who have actually built transceivers so far can't get anywhere near the rates originally predicted (at least not without a shitload of errors). One very cool application of UWB is for radar/ranging/mapping. A friend of mine set up a UWB system that can determine the breathing rate & heart beat of a motionless person - even through a wall. I've also seen through the wall radar boxes for police applications (to scan inside a room before the cops break in to figure out where everybody is). Oh and for that whole noise floor thing, you don't want to be near one of those transmitters if you have equipment running. Their damn pulser would overwhelm my software radio's RF front end every time they turned it on - and I was transmitting across a room from a directional antenna (log-periodic) to my antenna array! ---- Now onto the whole cell phone systems being overwhelmed - the systems were not designed to handle thousands of people all using their phones at the same time. It's never going to happen.

problem: hurricanes do not file flight paths

[johnpaul191]

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.