| Emergency network to save thousands of lives |
| Written by Dave Burstein |
| Tuesday, 23 March 2010 21:50 |
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Carlos Kirjner and team will almost certainly save thousands of lives with the nationwide public safety network that's part of the broadband plan. Carlos led the investigation of the communications breakdown in the final minutes of the World Trade Center and listened to the calls Many of the 300 firemen who died might have been saved if they heard the evacuation order.
The international takeaway, as emphasized by Jamie Barnett, is that there's a remarkable opportunity to save money by coordinating the government network with the LTE networks being built commercially. Piggybacking on LTE buildouts starting right now produces cost estimates much lower than those I've seen before for government neworks. LTE is going to 41,000 cell sites - 95+% of the U.S. population - over the next few years. Adding the radios for the public safety network will cost $95,000 per plus another $35,000 each for hardening including batteries that should last at least twice as long. 99% coverage is reached by upgrading or adding another 3,200 cell sites with enough power to communicate with antennae on emergency vehicles, which can relay to nearby cell phones as well. When needed, public safety will be able to almost instantly take over not just dedicated airwaves but also the commercial LTE bands, tripling or quadrupling the emergency bandwidth. Small trucks with mobile masts ready to deploy in minutes will be prepositioned nationwide - SUV mounted COWS. Satellite will be systematically supported for the last fraction of a percent. Every commercial building will be expected to have indoor coverage through repeaters or femtocells. Handheld units will normally be larger than cellphones with big batteries and rubber ducky antennae, but use many of the same components to keep the cost reasonable. The initial plan is to add a fee up to $1 to every broadband connection to pay for this, although it could also be collected from the wireless carriers' spectrum fees. It's a remarkable achievement, but some public safety officials want even more. Charles Dowd, deputy chief of the New York City Police Department, strongly opposes letting private companies run the network. "Commercial networks simply aren't built to the standards we need," he tells Kim Hart in The Hill. I asked my brother Danny for perspective. He drove ambulances out of Harlem Hospital for a decade before injuring his shoulder and becoming a network administrator. Danny tells me ";The A Number One issue is back up power. Public safety demands are a lot higher than the four hour battery pack in your FIOS box." The NBP addressed that directly, by including $35,000/cell site for "hardening," starting with longer lasting batteries. Dowd led a New York City report that chose a very similar technology to the broadband plan but not private control. Verizon is firing 20,000 more people, so it's a legitimate question whether the telcos still have the emergency capabilities they had a decade ago. On the other hand, Bell leaders like Dick Lynch and Bill Smith remain among the most experienced disaster engineers in the world. I've sent a note over to Dowd for details on the issues and will follow up. The technical design of the system seems right on target and worth emulating. The question of the operator - public or private - is more complicated. There are also questions of "who pays."; The public safety people believe their longterm saving from using their own spectrum will be far greater than whatever the government collects now in payments. That may well be true, although it's due to problems in the auction process that should be corrected. It's important to distinguish between real issues with the plan and the turf protection of some of the stakeholders. In particular, tradional public safety equipment provider Motorola is lobbying furiously to minimize change. They've been charging so much for "specialized" equipment, the savings in the new plan will allow much more coverage. Dowd's New York City Report http://bit.ly/cZNd4I |
