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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Efficiency and Robustness from SOAPbox
People have been worrying about the ability of a tightly coupled world to withstand shocks - including Hurricane Katrina and SARS.
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Crisis Management:
Control vs. Facilitation from BOPnews
Richard Veryard quotes Martin Geddes as follows: 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...
[Read more]
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Crisis Management:
Control vs. Facilitation from Tilting at Windmills
Richard Veryard quotes Martin Geddes as follows: 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...
[Read more]
I've felt compelled to post blogs on this critical topic for the past four weeks on my website, www.unwiremycity.com. Clearly, this nation needs a more resilient telecommunications infrastructure than what we currently have. Our networks failed us in our most recent disasters, as they have consistently failed us in disasters past. Our 20th Century networks do not meet the needs of our 21st Century society.
You make great points about centralized v. decentralized networks. Whether the threat is a terrorist who targets central offices of a telecom company, or a hurricane that buries a central office under 10 feet of flood waters, the effect is the same, a disabled network from the loss of a critical hub.
By contrast, a wireless mesh network is resilient and self-healing - there are no central hubs to target, no lines to take out. Nevertheless, I share your pessimism that our political leaders will not look beyond the well-placed lobbyists of incumbent telecom companies who will seek a massive influx of cash to rebuild on the old model, rather than consider new models and new technologies that offer a new, improved solution to the new threats that we face.
Looking to the past for the solutions of the future does not have a good track record, but old habits are hard to break. And special interest politics are a time honored tradition that will be difficult to overcome. It will take the IT community pulling together as never before to get IP-based communications solutions on the agenda.
Posted by: at September 24, 2005 08:19 PM