[IP] more on Katrina and the folly of trusting cell phones
Begin forwarded message:
From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed@xxxxxxxx>
Date: September 1, 2005 2:41:25 PM EDT
To: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxx>, Bob Frankston
<Bob19-0501@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] Katrina and the folly of trusting cell phones
For IP, if you want:
Every big event seems to serve as a magnet for projecting personal
political views in rather ridiculous ways.
During 9/11, Internet based communications worked pretty well. The
result was that reporters descended on "experts" like me to try to
get a "money quote" that the Internet was designed to withstand
Global Thermonuclear War. When I pointed out that that was not the
case, it took a lot of effort to keep them from calling the next guy
in search of the story they wanted (truth be damned).
Now it seems that everyone is claiming their technology (including
some, like "self-organizing mesh radios" that don't exist yet) would
be the "best" solution for Katrina-like disasters.
I'd submit, Dave, that most of the "experts" don't know much at all
about the situation faced in Katrina. The technologies being
discussed may or may not be useful for the actual jobs at hand.
Trunked radio systems (which are the most common police and fire
systems) have central points of failure, and showed problems in
9/11. Cellular systems are not engineered for disasters, and may or
may not degrade gracefully. 2-way systems with repeaters like Ham
radios can be quite useful, but don't scale well.
Mesh systems look promising, but they've hardly been tried in such
situations.
It seems less likely that "hardening" existing systems is the proper
approach, compared to rethinking the overall emergency comms
architecture to focus on resiliency via flexibility and internetwork
interoperability.
If we want to deploy more resilient communications systems for near
and far future emergencies, I'm sure we could, given resolve and
innovative/creative thought coupled with engineering judgment. But
it's a sad waste to focus all this "expert" energy on Katrina's
relationship to today's random collection of technologies, as if we
are trying to be Cisco, Verizon Wireless, or Tropos shills.
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