Rewiring (and Unwiring) New Orleans

stinkymountain writes "Is New Orleans bouncing back from Hurricane Katrina with the most advanced telecom system in the country? According to Network World, carriers have invested billions to rebuild the wired and wireless networks in the city, and businesses are taking advantage of new, advanced telecom services." This story selected and edited by LinuxWorld editor for the day Saied Pinto.

Comments

Re:My god.

[Incongruity]

Hmm -- sounds like the urban equivalent of a forest fire in some ways -- the fire comes through and clears out all the old stuff and clears the way for new growth. It'd be very very cool to see New Orleans come back as a much less corrupt and much more modern city that business flocks to, thereby improving the job situation for all residents and improving the tax base allowing for restoration of the historic parts of the city, etc... of course, that's unlikely to happen as the powers that be seem to have survived the flood.

Things are improving....

[bjgeraci]

Things are getting better each day here in New Orleans.

One problem that is still present is phone service. A lot of people I know are primarily using cellular phones as their main numbers since the landlines are not reliable / available in some areas. To BellSouth's credit, they have taken this opportunity to replace the copper wires throughout the city with fiber optics, which will provide more bandwidth. But this will take some time to do (and it does not take an inordinate amount of extra time than replacing the lines with new copper wires).

A lot of people in the city are now talking about scanning their important pictures into the computer and sending them off to relatives out of town (by CD or email).

Some of the lessons learned from Katrina in New Orleans include:

• Offsite backups to other cities
• While cellular voice calls were not available, cellular text messaging was possible in the days after Katrina
• Rendundant lines / methods of communications is needed with no one point of failure. Before Katrina, this lesson was demonstrated when a large collection of fiber lines were cut accidentally, severing communications in a large region
• First responders should be able to communicate easily with each other. This was an issue after 9/11, and was still an issue for Katrina.

It is hoped that the lessons learned here help prepare other people in other places for the next emergency.

Re:My god.

[hador_nyc]

Hmm -- sounds like the urban equivalent of a forest fire in some ways -- the fire comes through and clears out all the old stuff and clears the way for new growth. It'd be very very cool to see New Orleans come back as a much less corrupt and much more modern city that business flocks to, thereby improving the job situation for all residents and improving the tax base allowing for restoration of the historic parts of the city, etc... of course, that's unlikely to happen as the powers that be seem to have survived the flood.

this kind of thing has happened before... London(middle ages... i forget when the big fire happened)... and the great fire that cured the plague(city was rebuilt with stone... much less hospitible to rats and their fleas) San Fran and their fire, Chicago.. and their fire.. jees I'm on a fire rant here, but what I'm saying is that I agree with you and it seems to me that there is a lot of historical evidence to support that... no doubt a lot more than i can think of when i should be working instead of typing this comment!