more on 3.2 million ETs and a comment on the article

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Jon M. Peha" <peha () cmu edu>
Date: September 10, 2005 3:53:10 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: Ip Ip <ip () v2 listbox com>, carl () media org,  
faulhabe () wharton upenn edu
Subject: Re: [IP] 3.2 million ETs and a comment on the article


I agree with Reed Hundt and Carl Malamud:  the communications
system used by first responders is inadequate.  It does not take
advantage of emerging technology, as they say.  Indeed, it does
not make sufficient use of the last few generations of technology.
(mesh networks, broadband wireless, location-based devices,
video, sensors, cognitive radio, cellular frequency reuse, ...)

I also agree with Gerry Faulhaber:  part of the problem is that
local public safety agencies often do not work together.  Engineers
should not be surprised that when tens of thousands of independent
decision makers build a complex infrastructure, it has problems.
In this case, it is more prone to interoperability failures,
consumes more spectrum, is less secure and dependable,
and costs more than it needs to.

Technology alone will not solve the problem.  Telling
thousands of public safety agencies that they need to behave
differently isn't going to solve the problem either.  Local governments
are rewarded or punished for meeting local needs with local
resources, and they have nether the ability nor the motivation to
look at the big picture.  We will never get there as long as
the role of the  federal government  is to provide a tiny bit of
assistance to local government, with local always leading the way.

We need a national strategy, that all local governments will follow -
one that uses today's technology to meet today's (post-9/11) needs.
That means we need federal leadership.

If anyone wants more of my writings on the topic, see
Protecting Public Safety With Better Communications Systems, IEEE  
Communications
How America's Fragmented Approach to Public Safety Wastes Spectrum  
and Funding, TPRC
(Also at www.ece.cmu.edu/~peha/safety.html if those links don't work)

Jon
_________________________________________________
Jon M. Peha
Associate Director, Center for Wireless and Broadband Networks
Professor of Electrical Engineering and Public Policy
Carnegie Mellon University
www.ece.cmu.edu/~peha and www.epp.cmu.edu/httpdocs/people/bios/peha.html



> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Carl Malamud <carl () media org>
> Date: September 9, 2005 6:40:56 PM EDT
> To: dave () farber net
> 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 () wharton upenn edu>
> Date: September 9, 2005 9:56:34 PM EDT
> To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
> 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
>
>
>
>
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