[IP] 3.2 million ETs and a comment on the article
Begin forwarded message:
From: Carl Malamud <carl@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: September 9, 2005 6:40:56 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: 3.2 million ETs and the U.S. ET Rebate Program
http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=1029179
A Better Communications System for Emergency Workers
By Reed E. Hundt and Carl Malamud
Katrina overwhelmed the nation's complex communications system,
raising serious questions about whether federal and local governments
need new powers to organize a rapid response by the wireless, wire,
cable, satellite, and broadcast industries. Moreover, it seems clear
that first responders ought to have a resilient, mobile wireless
data network that they can share.
Just as the government has known about the vulnerability of the
levees in New Orleans to a severe hurricane, so too has the problem
of incompatible and ineffective communications for first responders
and emergency personnel been well documented most recently by the
9/11 Commission. Tragically, while little progress has been made
in four years, the solution is also well-known. Just visit your
neighborhood Starbucks.
The United States today has no system in place that allows emergency
response personnel to communicate reliably and effectively in a
crisis. For years, government studies have pointed out how incompatible
and ineffective the communications systems used by emergency
responders are. An April, 2004 report by the Government Accounting
Office put it starkly: "The wireless communications used today by
many public officers, firefighters, emergency medical personnel,
and other public safety agencies do not provide [the ability] ...
to effectively carry out their normal duties and respond to
extraordinary events."
We saw the dire effects of this failure to properly equip our
emergency responders had in New York City in 2001, when the police
and fire departments in New York lost situational awareness because
they could not talk with each other. Yet there is no excuse that
our emergency responders should be unable to communicate when they
are in the field performing life-threatening and life-saving work
under the most difficult of situations.
Fixing this is not difficult. There are some concrete steps the
United States can and should take. The important thing to understand
is that we know how to do this. The pieces to put together a
national emergency response system are well understood.
We start with WiFi, the immensely popular wireless standard. If
you don't use it, you've probably seen it: people with laptops in
airports or cafes checking their email. Most of our broadcasting
spectrum, which is coordinated by the Federal Communications
Commission, is allocated to fixed purposes, such as a particular
TV station, cell phone provider or various government purposes.
WiFi started as an experiment, but has been wildly popular. And,
unlike a television station or other spectrum licensee, WiFi can
be used by shared by many different users. It is defined as a series
of access specifications instead of an absolute grant to one user.
There is a second characteristic that WiFi has, which is also shared
by the Internet. Both are systems designed to operate successfully
even if many of the nodes of the network fail--the Internet actually
has it's roots in Department of Defense research into fail-safe
networks in various doomsday scenarios.
The United States should allocate a part of our spectrum to emergency
responders. While there is a huge debate in Washington about how
to divvy up the spectrum among the many competing uses, in this
case there is no reason for any debate. Congress can authorize the
FCC to dedicate a chunk of spectrum to an emergency response system.
It is a no-brainer that would not significantly impact the broadcast
or telecommunications industries or existing government users.
After allocating spectrum, the government should specify the access
mechanism. There is nothing to invent here: something like WiFi and
the Internet is the obvious solution. There is no reason to reinvent
the wheel. Instead, the government should simply ask the standards
bodies that define specifications for WiFi and the Internet to
specify which of their existing standards need to be used. The
important point is that any standards used should be free from any
patent, or licensing considerations that would hinder open source
development efforts.
What could you do with this spectrum? A look in any PC magazine
or at the thousands of blogs devoted to hardware shows that a lot
of what you want out of an emergency response system already exists
in the wild on the Internet. Indeed, when the city of New Orleans
needed to restablish communication with the outside world, a PC and
an Internet phone call were the Mayor's only communications link.
Using standard off-the-shelf technology, emergency responders can
receive pages, talk to each other, do simple text messaging, transmit
photographs, and retrieve maps. Responders could easily be equipped
with devices as simple as their existing pagers to the most
sophisticated HazMat analysis. The Department of Homeland Security
can take the recommendations of the standards bodies that established
WiFi and the Internet and then designate a procedure, such as an
automated on-line testing suite, that allows industry vendors to
demonstrate compliance with the appropriate standards for a particular
device.
How much would we need for such a system? Let's start with the
folks in the field. The RAND corporation, in a 2003 study, estimated
that there are 1.1 million firefighters (of which 75% are volunteers),
500,000 emergency medical responders, and 800,000 law enforcement
officers. Add to that 500,000 members of the National Guard, and
another 300,000 other essential workers, and we're talking 3.2
million emergency responders in the United States.
The basic task is straightforward: every single emergency responder
in the United States should be equipped with a simple Emergency
Transponder (ET) that can receive pages and allow at least voice
and text communications with other workers. We think such a device
could be built for as little as $150. It would be a trivial task
for the government to offer a $150 ET Rebate on the first 3.2 million
devices.
WiFi devices can communicate directly with each other, something
known as "ad hoc" or "grid" networking. That's a really good thing.
Even if the central infrastructure is gone, two people can talk
directly to each other.
But, a robust and stable communications network also has a series
of central nodes that stabilize and strengthen the network. With
the WiFi architecture, the most effective way to do this is with
mobile or portable antennas. These are known as routers or repeaters,
and in the case of the ET system consists of an antenna and a
computer, forming a mobile base station that can be placed in a
car, helicopter, airplane, fire truck, ambulance, blimp or be
portable as part of a fireman's kit. When a disaster hits, as soon
as people and equipment get mobilized, the communications network
gets stronger. We think two million vehicles could be equipped in
short order.
A 1999 study by the government's Public Safety Wireless Network,
since subsumed into the Department of Homeland Security, said it
would cost $18 billion to equip every emergency responder with a
compatible radio system. But technology has changed since 1999.
Preparedness, however, has not changed. A 2004 Council on Foreign
Relations report by the task force on Emergency Responders, chaired
by Warren B. Rudman, had the subtitle "Drastically Underfunded,
Dangerously Unprepared." The report pointed out that, among other
evidence of unpreparedness, "fire departments across the country
have only enough radios to equip half the firefighters on a shift."
There is no need to study this issue further. Its time to act. The
private sector is agile enough and competitive enough to do this,
and an ET Rebate program costing less than $1 billion for the entire
country would quickly jumpstart the deployment of devices into the
field. And there is no reason that such a system can't be fully
deployed by the middle of 2006.
Every day, emergency responders face situations where they cannot
communicate with each other. We see the catastrophic results when
events like Katrina occur, but firefighters and EMTs and police
officers see thiks problem every single day.
An interoperable and dependable emergency communications system is
only one of many steps we must take to protect our homeland and
respond to national disasters. But it is an essential step that
is technologically feasible and should be done now to protect the
safety of those who protect the safety of all of us.
Reed E. Hundt served as Chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission from 1993 to 1997. He is an advisor and board member
to several technology companies.
Carl Malamud is a Senior Fellow and the Chief Technology Officer
of the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. For the
last two years, he served as a volunteer firefighter in Sixes,
Oregon.
and comment
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Faulhaber, Gerald" <faulhabe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: September 9, 2005 9:56:34 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: 3.2 million ETs and the U.S. ET Rebate Program
Dave [for IP if you wish]--
The article by Reed Hundt and Carl Malamud, while topical, is way off
the mark. The problems with first responder communications has never
been an absence of technology, nor an absence of infrastructure, nor the
need for more spectrum. The problem is that police departments, fire
departments and EMT services don't want others sharing their spectrum
(of which quite a lot is already allocated to public safety, thank you
very much). This has always been about control: do the police control
the spectrum? Fire? EMT? The private sector producers of radio
equipment are of course ready to respond to a joint demand from all
first responders with devices that send/receive on all public safety
channels. Technically, this is as trivially easy to do now as it was
before 9/11. Indeed, it was easy 50 years ago. But the demand is not
there: each bailiwick wants to protect their own turf (sound like DoD?
Army/Navy/Air Force? You betcha). Despite task force reports,
Presidential Commissions, et al., these problems are still not solved,
and they can only be solved at the local level, one community at a time.
And much of the equipment being used by public safety are old analog
devices that are bandwidth hogs as well. There is plenty of public
safety spectrum, but it is not used very efficiently. And it is not
interoperable across function because of turf wars. This is not
something we need fancy new systems (like mesh networking) that are not
yet commercially deployed to solve. This is not an Internet issue, nor
is it a WiFi issue, although the authors trot out all the techie hot
buttons for us. This is about first responders solving turf wars and
deploying digital technology to use their spectrum more efficiently.
This is a job that needs to get done, and this article, by waving around
Internet buzz words and hinting that there is a tech fix (which there
isn't) is not only not helpful it is counterproductive.
Professor Gerald R. Faulhaber
Business and Public Policy Dept.
Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104
-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To manage your subscription, go to
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip
Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/