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Report Rips Government Wireless Network Effort
coondoggie writes with this excerpt from NetworkWorld:
"Like a bunch of children in a sandbox unable and perhaps unwilling to share their toys, multiple key government agencies cannot or will not cooperate to build a collaborative wireless network. The Government Accountability Office report (PDF) issued today took aim at the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and the Treasury which had intended what's known as The Integrated Wireless Network (IWN) to be a joint radio communications system to improve communication among law enforcement agencies. However IWN, which has already cost millions of dollars, is no longer being pursued as a joint development project, the GAO said. By abandoning collaboration on a joint implementation, the departments risk duplication of effort and inefficient use of resources as they continue to invest significant resources in independent solutions. Further, these efforts will not ensure the interoperability needed to serve day-to-day law enforcement operations or a coordinated response to terrorist or other events, the GAO said."
See title. Basically like the GPS, you can access the internet from anywhere using special technology. Security is obviously going to be the biggest issue however.
Government fails to accomplish something. Also, we'll tell you which soda can kill you. After news, weather and sports.
This sure puts a dent in the idea that government is all about sharing and cooperation. All I see here is evidence of self-interest.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Satellite internet systems are and have been available to the public. But it is usually used by people who are in rural areas, because of the signal delays (latency) involved. A packet has to get from your computer up to the satellite, relayed back to a ground station where it is put on the Internet, then the returning packets have to go up to the satellite, then back to your computer...
I worked as a tech in a store that sold some of the first Satellite internet systems. It was broadband... the overall speed was good, and better than dialup (not may people had access to cable internet yet at the time). But that latency was a killer. Type in a URL and hit "go", and you waited. And waited. 3 seconds, 4 seconds, 6 seconds... then WHAM! Your page displayed all at once.
It works, but it is not ideal.
Why not just make a new radio band for a huge peer to peer wifi like system?
Those first systems did not have uplink. Your outgoing packets went over the phone line. It was only incoming data that went over the satellite.
However, the newer systems with uplink are not all that much better. The outgoing data rate is certainly faster than the telephone was, but you still have the delays.
When I first heard of the FCC's plans for a free wireless network, I was concerned that the filtering mandate might eventually be applied to adults as well as minors. I was accused of making a "slippery slope" argument, but after reading about other countries expanding their own filtering efforts after initially limiting the filters to illegal content, I am quite convinced that the FCC's plan is a very bad idea indeed. Filtered internet and the potential displacement of commercial alternatives? No thanks. I want my Internet without filters of any kind.
Let the spectrum go to unlicensed devices and have a network grow organically around that.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
I should at least read the summary before posting, no?
Apologies.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
There is already an interoperable network out there. It is called Amateur Radio. Millions of individuals are able to communicate around the world for recreation and when neccessary under disaster situations. The network can handle voice, image and data communications. Not only that it doesn't cost the goverment a dime.
The problem with the goverment's effort, is that some salesman from a big corporation tried to sell them a gold plated overly complicated solution.
A good example is the Coast Guard Auxiliary. The Auxiliary relies on amateur radio operators to provide emergency search and rescue support. The goverment's interoperability efforts resulted in regulations that prevented amateur participation unless the operators purchased special (read expensive)radios that supported the non standard specifications endorsed by the goverment.
The simple solution is for the FCC to define the block of frequencies to be used for interoperable communications. Then the FCC needs to mandate standard comercially available modulation standards and insist that all radios used by the goverment include those frequencies and modes. This is not high technology here. Most of the equipment is available commercially to buisness and amateurs. Once thr frequencies and operating modes are set, the incident commander (or his communications officer) can assign and enforce operating frequencies as needed.
Wow. I worked on IWN in a very limited capacity for one of the bidders back in early 2005. It was pretty clear then that the whole thing was going to be a huge cluster-fuck, but it was exciting to be a part of it for a while.
If the process continued the way it was going when I left, it is almost surely the Feds' fault. They were demanding certain requirements that were nearly impossible to engineer and didn't make much sense anyway. And the whole RFP described technology in ways that made it clear that the government folks running it were completely out of touch with the technology.
Essentially, the Feds wanted a device or devices that were a combination of tricorders, mobile phones, and walkie-talkies, as well as a national network to run them on.
They envisioned devices and a network that would allow primarily federal agents but also emergency first-responders to call anyone a-la a phone, push-to-talk to anyone a-la a walkie-talkie, take mug shots/scan fingerprints and get an instant identification, and pull whatever data from whatever government sources. Nationally, instantly, wirelessly, seamlessly.
I was just a lowly proposal writer and I suspected the whole thing was impossible. The engineers I worked with knew it was impossible, but it was really impressive to watch them try to build it anyway.
For the $10 billion the government was offering, you could understand why.
The bidder I was contracted to, via a small consultancy, wanted to call their team the National Wireless Alliance, or NWA. We thought that was a pretty ironic name for something to be used by cops. I suggested the Intra-Continental Emergency Telenetwork, or ICE-T. My buddy proposed the Wireless Universal Telephone And Network Group.
Among the many things I learned was that the government, and the extremely big companies that go for $10B deals with them, are utterly humorless.
But my hat was and is definitely off to the engineers, who were putting together some really great ideas.
When you asked government to take on this project, you asked for bureaucracy, in-fighting, and inefficiency.
Management called for instant everything, unlimited bandwidth, universally interoperable devices, handheld portables with infinite range and a long battery life. Then they act disppointed when, $10 billion dollars later, they still got nothin'. It's like those job advertisements asking for "5+ years Vista programming experience." Oh wait, ha ha, those don't exist either!
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Figure up and back, about 25,000 mi. each way (maybe exaggerated), that is still less than 1/3 of a second.
But once a satellite receives a signal, it gets multiplexed with other data (adding delays), then sent to the ground, demultiplexed (adding delays), converted to internet-ready packets (adding delays), switched onto the internet (adding delays)... then all the same on the way back. And I have probably omitted a few steps.
That total fiasco in Bush's Republican paradise reminds me of Rudolph Giuliani's Republican rule of NYC. In 1993, terrorists tried to blow up the World Trade Center with a truckbomb in the basement (it almost toppled the building). The cops, firemen and ambulances that arrived were plagued by radio chaos that made it much harder to rescue the people from the buildings (about 110,000 people used to fill the towers on a typical busy day). That fiasco was just the worst example of the radio conflicts that those first responders had been reporting for years. But the 1993 WTC bombings were supposed to be a wake up call. Rudy Giuliani was the mayor. And for the next 8 years, Giuliani's office claimed it was working out all the problems, making a unified radio system that would avoid such a problem in the future. Giuliani spent years and many millions of dollars on outside contractors to make it work.
Then on September 11, 2001, it happened again. The World Trade Center was bombed (by planes this time), the first responders showed up, their radios didnt' work together. Hundreds of those first responders were killed in the collapsing buildings, 3000 civilians were killed. Who knows how many of them, especially the first responders, might have survived if Giuliani had actually done his job as he said he was doing.
I note that Michael Chertoff has been running "Homeland Security" the past 4 years, picked by Giuliani for the post from Giuliani's cronies in NYC. Bringing his NYC expertise to New Orleans and the entire nation.
Giuliani had tried to install Bernard Kerik, but Keriks mob connections and mistress at a Ground Zero "HQ" apartment smokescreened Kerik's previous couple years as Iraq's first Interior Minister: responsible for the national police, border patrol and oil operations which he got set up as the worst travesties in that catastrophic state. I bet their radios don't work either.
Rudy 9ui11ani is already running for 2012. Maybe he'll promise to bring telecom reform this time.
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make install -not war
...I wonder how they expect to secure the Internet.
Because the governments done such a good job with management of the rest of the wireless spectrum. In fact,that's why everyone uses 802.11b, but cellphones still have dead zones *in major metropolitan areas* I know Obamaman will fix that for you, because he stands for change.
What an effective government could do with the resources given them is not to be wished. It were better if government were divided and ineffective.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Imagine if you will, a national government in which the inappropriate law enforcement concerns were promoted across a national network.
Now imagine that Cletus the LEO volunteer in North Georgia were able to broadcast his tinfoil hat aryan fantasies.
Now imagine that you were part of the problem.
That's enough imagining. Sleep well.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
No, the problem is that the government is incompetent. Your argument fails because if the government people were competent they would stop using incompetent contractors.
But I don't think the competence of the contractors even matters. The GAO specifically said the project was failing because the different government agencies weren't cooperating with each other and were duplicating effort. How can you possibly blame that on the contractor(s)?
Maybe not
One thing to remember when dealing with Amateur operators is that certain pieces of information, (read Hippa restricted) are not allowed to be transmitted in a manner that leaves that communication open for unauthorized people to monitor. At the same time, Amateur service operators (Hams) are not allowed to use encryption or other means of 'hiding' information in what they communicate on Amateur bands.
Part of this can be alleviated by authorizing Amateur operators to use frequencies and technology in support of emergency communications on bands allocated for the appropriate encryption, however at that point you eliminate the need for an amateur operator to be in the loop at all.
Acknowledged Amateur operators are authorized to use whatever radio and or technologies are available to them to communicate emergency traffic in the case of an emergency. However that tends to exclude the variety of information or traffic that supports operations in an emergency situation. The specific exclusion is designed to allow an amateur operator to pass traffic to the appropriate rescue agency to save lives and in some cases (not all) property. While it may be argued that traffic to request supply replenishment for the local shelter will save lives, it is not emergency traffic in nature.
Amateurs can and will continue to support emergency operations, however we know that we have limitations imposed on us by the license we hold, that are in contradiction to regulations regarding traffic that many of the agencies we are willing to support would like us to handle.
As far as the idea of a single system that supports all of the agencies, I don't have any idea when that is going to be pulled together. I doubt that it will be within the next year or four.
You never know...
God, I love the GAO. No matter how idiotic the federal government gets, the Government Accountability Office is always there to point out the insanity with respectful but absolutely devastating bluntness. Somehow they seem to be immune to the groupthink and pigheadedness that fills the rest of Washington -- and as the government's official internal critics, that's a very good sign.
I think the existence of the GAO is the surest proof that the U.S. hasn't completely gone down the tubes yet. We won't set off on the road to "1984" until the federal government stops honestly criticizing itself.
Well played friend. Another source that verifies that is images.google.com/images?q=goatse&safe=off