At VON today I was on a panel about how the communications industry can better deal with disasters like Katrina.
What if New Orleans was a poor city on the Bay of Bengal, and not the Gulf of Mexico. A typhoon rips through it. How many people die? A lot more than in Louisiana and Mississippi.
Morbid as the thought experiment may be, it tells us that Katrina wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been. What went right? A whole load of people had reliable electricity, watched their TVs, got in their cars, are drove out. A distributed response based on central information.
You need to differentiate between an emergency and a disaster. In an emergency, a distributed piece of information calls for a central response. A disaster, the converse. Those best informed are in the field; those best equipped, in the field. The best disaster response system is the one in your hand when the disaster strikes.
This is a bit of a good news/bad news story. Just by making a better everyday communications system, we make a better disaster response system.
But the changes needed to make things better are politically painful and resistent by incumbent powers. Not just portable numbers, but user-owned ones; cheap municipal networks that encourage universal adoption; and spectrum liberalisation.
Imagine for a moment that the expressway out of New Orleans was a toll road, and they had been turning people back who didn't have the change ready. There would be a physical and political riot!
But silently create an artificial inflation of the costs of wireless technology, and you have the same effect. People can't afford the service, they flee, get cut off from their telephony service. The industry is reduced to after-the-event patches over the gaping communications wound.
I suspect that central committees will determine we need more central response systems, and weaken the economy by taxing everyone hard to pay for it. The exact opposite of the medicine a "network edge" response would dictate.
Sorry I can't offer a more upbeat assessment.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 11:07 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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