Slashdot Mirror
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?
No. This is a mobile cell tower in a box, not just one phone.
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.
Presumably this would work just like any other GSM network, where authorized users are given a SIM and then those SIMs be in the network database as allowed. The obvious downside of this is that some (all?) of the major GSM providers in the US either lock their phones so that only their SIM chips will work, or don't use a SIM at all.
I guess maybe they could just *read* the IMSI off of each user's existing SIM and then manually build the database, but that'd be a lot more work on the admin side.