Years after 9/11 and Katrina, Emergency Networks Still Inadequate

It’s been almost seven years since 9/11 and nearly three since Hurricane Katrina, but according to one expert, the nation’s emergency communications systems are still struggling to get the bandwidth and budgets they need to get built.

In a blog on the IT Business Edge website, Carl Weinschenk cites a number of incidents where emergency officials have had trouble communicating, including one incident where the police had to use their personnel cell phones when all the channels of the emergency network crashed.

“The 700 MHz auction held in January was designed in part to produce the spectrum for a nationwide emergency network. It didn’t quite work out that way,” Weinschenk says. “The D-block bidding didn’t meet the $1.3 billion reserve price and thus the plan was momentarily scuttled.”

He points out that there are still plenty of tools available in the private sector, including wireless mesh networks.  And while the first iteration of municipal Wi-Fi has failed, Weinschenk says the real cause of the failure was simply the service provider, not the technology.

“The thinking is that using municipalities as the anchor tenants on networks with sounder business plans could give this sector a second life,” he adds. “First responder networks are a key element of such projects. Moreover, a particular type of wireless network – mesh – is particularly promising. Such networks can be thrown up quickly and reconfigured in an agile manner.”

To read the full article, click here: www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/cip/?p=355