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Military System Offers Worldwide Cell Access
coondoggie writes to mention a technology in use by the U.S. military in remote regions of the world, which allows high-quality cell reception to reach troops. A portable box, called the Tactical Base Station Router, can serve as a gateway for cellular communications and VoIP network calls. Developed by Alcatel-Lucent, it allows deployment of reliable services in disasters, search and rescue operations, and (as has seen use in recent years) military encounters. "The TacBSR is available for U.S. government customers only ... Customers include the U.S. Army Reserve Command, which is using the TacBSR as a portable cellular system for forward-deployed operations and disaster recovery. The system allows U.S. Army Reserve Commands to take GSM-capable cellular systems anywhere they need to go ... Smaller than a laptop, the TacBSR can be used in a stand-alone configuration to enable communications for a small team or as part of a multibox mesh that supports a large geographical area."
Isn't this what the first mobile phones were? My grandfather used to have a big black box in his lincoln that had a phone attached to it and he'd plug into the cigarette lighter. It looked like one of these. Hard to say if he was doing a lot of global Special Focrces work though, that Lincoln never made it over 35mph.
As usual TFA is light on technical details. Did anyone pick up on how this works? I'm also curious about the encryption- they mention that it can be used for encrypted cell calls, so does that mean that the data/VOIP side is sent unencrypted?
One other thing just occured to me- if this is supposed to be for remote military operations, would it be of any use against an opponent who can track radio signals? I don't think cell phone protocols can do all of the fancy frequency hopping and other tricks that most military radios use...
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Isn't this just like the consumer-grade picocells the telecoms have been talking about placing in customer homes? Boosts local signal, routes to VoIP?
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Well, at least something good came from Katrina.
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another tool for imperialist USA to oppress the world with.
so when are you people going to overthrow that corrupt to the core government of yours?
You still can't get reliable, quality cell service in many populated areas in the U.S.A. yet the government is providing service so soldiers can chat on their RAZRs in Garblockistan?
Should this be a "Good to see where our priorities are" rant, or a "Yaay, the private sector sure solves all problems!" rant?
arent' they worried about the cylons hacking into the voip?
The current issues in Iraq and Afghanistan (ie not winning) are due entirely to the idiocy and the weakness of the American leadership.
The sooner the US military takes off the white gloves when dealing with the enemy, the sooner we will win. I believe there was a warning given last year about this to those who would take advantage of the current situation to threaten America.
Personnally, I think that a few volunteer gun clubs would pacify things tremendiously and permanently in these areas.
I went to SWA twice while I was in the Air Force. Was never in combat, but those guys have radios between each other and the base that are more reliable than cell phones anyway.
The first time I was there I used a sat. phone briefly and it worked, but there was a noticable delay, the primary means of communicating to the states was Cisco IP phones and DSN.
The second time I was over there we bought regular gsm phones from a company call Mobal in England. Those had no noticable delay using commercial carriers (obviously we weren't discussing anything critical) and the only place they weren't reliable was Iraq.
On the other hand, in New Orleans after Katrina, about the only way I could communicate with the remote team I was working with was sending each other sms messages that ended up getting delivered about 10-15 minutes later.
I guess what I'm saying is that there is a use for this technology, but based on my experience they're not targeting it properly.
does the TacBSR interface with the rest of the world? The article suggests it uses a VOIP link, but is that link wireless or wired? Does it have an Ethernet port, can it interface with telephony equipment?
Also, it'd be interesting to see what happens when you start a TacBSR in an area that already has cell phone coverage. Can you specify who can and who can't use the TacBSR network?
Can it talk to the billing system of the local telco (not so interesting for military use, but may be a factor during disaster relief, when civilians will use the system)?
If it's any consolation, I just returned from Afghanistan in January and never even heard of this thing until now. Also, it's probably a hell of a lot easier to provide cell coverage to a few small areas with concentrations of US military personnel than to provide comprehensive coverage over North America. If you don't like your cell service, bitch to the company, not the military.
Many people did sign up for cell service on the base we were staged from, paying $40 or $50 per month for 500 minutes, though I think incoming calls did not count against that. I spent too much time out in the field for that to be worthwhile, though I did get internet access in my room whenever we'd come back to base for a week or two--again, $35/month for dial-up speeds (but worse latency; timeouts every fourth or fifth http request) with no English-speaking support and frequent DNS outages.
Yes, I'm horribly biased, but if DoD can provide something like this on the cheap for the guys downrange, more power to them. Very rarely was it worth it to me to wait in line for an hour to try to talk to someone from home for 15 minutes--assuming I could stay connected that long.
the military fucks y...
I think I'll stop right there, thank you very much.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Anyone have a guess on the range for one of these? I imagine it's gotta be farther than your run-o-the-mill router...
And all of the cool toys they get to play with.
Can you hear me now?
The "first thing to go out" in every emergency of any geographical size is the local cell phone system. (see Slashdot article just after Katrina) FEMA also carts around a mobile cell system in its fleet of emergency vehicles for post-emergency recovery and relief personnel. This article says it's referring to the Army Reserve, which generally shows up not too long after FEMA, as it has the largest inventory in-place. Also, the AR arrival is usually in the recover and relief phase, not the first responder phase. I think they are still having problems with the cell phone system down in south Louisiana.
Finally we can stop hearing hams thumping their chests about how critical they are. We can replace them with small boxes.
This might seem a good idea at first but it would make much more sense and be much more future-proof to just give everyone regular WiFi VoIP phones, perhaps with small PV chargers, and set up a small mesh of routers. Charging cell phones in the dessert and continuously broadcasting your location might not be that smart. Also, properly encrypted VoIP calls are more secure than GSM cell phone calls anytime.
My brother worked on the Iridium satellite phone project back in the day. It seems to me that it's just as effective as ever and would be superior to this in almost every way.
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"Should this be a "Good to see where our priorities are" rant, or a "Yaay, the private sector sure solves all problems!" rant?"
Rant, just make certain of your aim.
Military System Offers Worldwide Cell Access
When I read the headline, the first thought that came into my mind was: Now you can be imprisoned everywhere by the US military. My second thought was that this is nothing new.
I think US millitary get use these types of technologies-it reminds me of GPS-that was originally setup by the Department of Defence-DoD. And USFIF and DAFIF are another mil-only things that come to mind. Again, if you want good reception-consumers probably won't get anything close to what Alcatel-Lucent is offering government customers.
We had one, and we used it quite a bit. However, they're pretty damned expensive--$1000 a pop, I think I was told--and are in supremely limited circulation for that reason. This sounds like something that could be in more widespread use and would probably be more practical for local point-to-point calling; using satellite phones to call the guy on the other side of the FOB is a bit much.
My impression from the article is that it is about using commercial networks. This is fine for FEMA, but not something I see the military using. It looks like a solution chasing a problem to me.
Not at all. A vast portion of the military isn't in the "spearhead," the people who are actually in contact with the enemy, it's in the shaft driving it: all the logistics / supply chain / transportation / etc.
That's where something like this would be really good for. You don't need everyone back in the rear using tactical, encrypted, frequency-hopping radios to call back to the mess tent to find out whether they're out of canned beans, or other stuff like that. First, because it's godawful expensive to provision everyone back there with expensive field gear, and second, because it creates interference and frequency-allocation problems with people who do have a legitimate use for the more advanced stuff.
A friend of mine just got back from a tour with the USMC in Iraq, and they had honest-to-god wire-line field phones (ones like this, although they were slightly more modern, probably Vietnam or Korea-era, not WWII) running between different positions within their FOB, because nobody wanted "housekeeping" traffic and banter on the tactical radios, and they were short on them and wanted to save them for patrols.
So there's definitely a need for this. Plus, in any modern (U.S.) war zone, you have tons and tons of non-military support personnel, contractors and DA civilians and USG employees and the rest, and it's a lot easier for them if they can just use regular cellphones to communicate with each other, than if they have to be given radios (and training on how to use them, or for high-ranking/value people, their own RTO to follow them around).
Being able to rapidly deploy a cell-phone network behind an army as it moves forwards, so that everyone behind the lines can just use regular consumer cell gear, would be a big step forward.
There are a lot of generally dumb, wasteful, and/or stupid ideas that get put forward by people looking to score a buck from the government, but I think this is one that could really have a lot of promise.
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