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There's no such thing as a "Vonage link", what was the transport? Anybody have a Wall St Journal subscription? Buy a Packet8(has E911) box instead because Vonage isn't telling us what the transport and backhaul were. "I think the ability to use Vonage service from a hotel room in New Orleans, even if it did not have traditional E-911 capabilities, puts this issue in back in perspective. (Frankly, I must commend Chairman Martin for his prescience in extending the deadline to cut off customers just days ahead of Hurricane Katrina.) Now, once again, the VoIP industry has been excluded from the dialogue[dialog at FCC what-learned-from-Katrina meeting]" -Bob http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05252/568686.stm After Katrina, city officials struggled to keep order Friday, September 09, 2005 By Christopher Rhoads, The Wall Street Journal NEW ORLEANS -- "Hurricane conditions first hit the city on Saturday, Aug. 27... By the time the eye of Katrina made landfall that Monday morning,
the
group had already suffered more than 24 hours of hurricane-force winds,
including a tornado that ripped off part of one side of the
hotel..."When the tornado rolled over us, you could hear a weird
rumbling
sound," recalled the 40-year-old Mr. Meffert this week, sitting
unshaven behind his desk in City Hall in khaki shorts, a black T-shirt
and white tennis sneakers. Army Rangers and other troops ran through
the still submerged streets below his window. "You could hear the
windows popping out like gunshots," he said...Mr.
Meffert says phone service went out at the Hyatt because of power
failures and water damage to the hotel's main switch. After that, the
Hyatt team's only available means of communication were police radios.
But those were operating at a fraction of capacity because the
generator serving the main transmission site broke down. Sometimes
dozens of officers were trying to use one channel...The water reached
within three inches of the room but never damaged the electronics, Mr.
Meffert says...New Orleans had an emergency communications plan, but it
had serious
flaws. The back-up communications of the city's Office of Emergency
Preparedness consisted of a few older model satellite phones, but their
batteries went dead and couldn't be recharged, Mr. Meffert says...In
the early stages of the storm, the city's emergency command office,
on the ninth floor of city hall, got power from an emergency diesel
generator. But by the time the hurricane passed, it had burned up about
one third of its fuel. Fuel soon ran out completely and couldn't be
replenished...For days after Hurricane Katrina's devastating rampage
through this
city, a small corps of city leaders holed up at the Hyatt Hotel. They
had virtually no way to communicate with the outside world...A command
center set up before the storm stopped working when the
backup generator ran out of diesel fuel. Cellphone towers had been
knocked out by high winds. Many land lines in the area were unusable...
On Tuesday, the levee at the 17th Street Canal broke...When
emergency power finally returned to the Hyatt, Scott Domke, a
member of the city's technology team, remembered that he had recently
set up an Internet phone account with Vonage Holdings Corp. He was able
to find a working socket in a conference room and linked his laptop to
an Internet connection...At 12:27 a.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 31, the
mayor's inner circle made its
first outside call in two days. Eventually, the team was able to get
eight lines running from the single Vonage account...Mr. Meffert, a
software entrepreneur before he joined the mayor's
office in 2002, realized he needed more lines and more phones to cope
with a rapidly deteriorating situation. Before dawn on Wednesday,
Messrs. Meffert and Domke and some other aides drove a military Humvee
into the darkness and devastation. They were accompanied by the chief
of police, Eddie Compass...Their destination was Office Depot...
Mr. Meffert told the chief he needed a large computer server for email.
They found the one used by Office Depot in its backroom...For the next
five days, virtually all communications out of New Orleans
by the city's top officials depended on Mr. Domke's laptop and this
single Internet phone account... That evening, the
phone rang and it was President Bush calling from Air Force One...
On Thursday morning, Mr. Meffert's team got word that 200 gang members
were moving on the Hyatt...An elevated walkway from the Superdome
connects to a shopping arcade, which in turn connects to the Hyatt... September 09, 2005
President's Call Used Vonage Link
Bob Dodds wrote:
Maybe the technology's power and flexibility will change the lack of respect shown it by the FCC, which so far under new chairman Kevin Martin has done nothing but saddle the VoIP industry with old-school regulation that could hamper its growth. But unlike some other bureaucrats, Martin has been in almost constant positive motion since the storm hit, even traveling to the region to see the damage first-hand. To his credit, the FCC has remained open for business on a 24x7 basis since last week, doing all it can to waive normal regulations (of things like spectrum use, etc.) so that emergency communications can be quickly established. And Martin has designated next week's FCC meeting as a "learning
session" on the damages
wrought by Katrina,
perhaps to learn what went wrong while the miscues are still fresh in
everyone's mind. Credit is due to Martin for doing his best to keep the
FCC from being a bottleneck in the restoration of communications. http://pulverblog.pulver.com/archives/002871.html page 1 of the Wall Street Journal in the story: “At Center of Crisis, City Officials Faced Struggle to Keep in Touch.” The punch line of the story was: “… At 12:27 a.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 31, the mayor's inner circle made its first outside call in two days. Eventually, the team was able to get eight lines running from the single Vonage account. That evening, the phone rang and it was President Bush calling from Air Force One.…” According to the story, Scott Domke, who is a member of the city of New Orleans technology team, remembered that he had recently set up an account with Vonage and he was able to use his softphone when he connected his laptop to an available internet connection at the Hyatt Hotel. Personally I think it was great to see Vonage get such a plug in the WSJ. One thing for certain, when the inevitable made-for-TV movie happens, I’m sure the Vonage phone service will be properly showcased. One side note is that how low-key Vonage themselves have been so far in the way their service ended up being used during the crisis and their mention on page 1 of this WSJ story. There is a part of me that wonders what the case would have been had the FCC not extended their E911 deadline for VoIP and if Mr. Domke would have been one of the customers required to be disconnected by Vonage due to non-compliance issues. Or what would have happened if the Hyatt Hotel’s ISP was found to be blocking SIP traffic in a way similar to what I had recently experienced at the Meridan Hotel a couple of weeks ago in London? I hold out hope that the FCC and others in Washington, D.C. will
find a new appreciation for the IP Communications industry and what is
means when “voice really is just an application”, the underlying need
to support Net Freedoms, and especially how useful VoIP can be when
used during an emergency. http://pulverblog.pulver.com/archives/002895.html FCC Moves Tomorrow's Open Meeting to BellSouth Emergency Call Center -- But Where are the Representatives of the IP-based Communications Industry?:The FCC has moved tomorrow's Open Meeting to a BellSouth Emergency Call Center in Atlanta. At this meeting, the FCC will hear presentations from various industry representatives concerning their role in Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts. The witness list includes the following participants: - Ken Moran, Director, Office of Homeland Security, Federal
Communications Commission This seems like a pretty broad cross-section of the communications industry and related entities. Notice any industry segment that has been excluded? I had hoped that one insight government might have gained from Hurricane Katrina is the value of promoting alternate modes of communications via IP and the Internet, and not compel all communications services to look alike and abide by identical standards to promote such social goods as emergency response. For the past week, members of the VoIP community have tried to do as much as possible to aid in hurricane relief efforts. In fact, the survivability, resilience and redundant topology of the Internet has demonstrated that IP-based communications and the Internet can be a boon to government and citizens in times of public crisis, at least if government does not shackle the industry with legacy regulations and cookie-cutter social obligations, and allows the industry to harness and advance the features, functionalities and capabilities afforded by IP technology. Most notably, as I mentioned a few days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Mayor of New Orleans was able to receive a call from President Bush on August 31, because a New Orleans city employee was able to establish communications via his Vonage service by connecting his laptop to an available Internet connection, while other communications services were down. The scary question remains: What would have happened had the FCC not extended its E911 deadline for VoIP? Would Vonage have had to disconnect the city employee's Vonage service if the employee failed to acknowledge by August 29, that he was aware of the emergency response limitations of his Vonage service? If the hurricane had occurred three months from now, would the city employee have been unable to utilize the nomadic capability of his Vonage service so that it would have been unusable at the remote location where he found broadband access? When the FCC adopted its Order imposing E-911 obligations on interconnected VoIP Service Providers, the FCC (ostensibly attempting to present an objective picture of what is going on in the world) heard the most heart-wrenching testimony from several people presenting harrowing accounts of the tragic events that resulted from their inability to reach emergency responders via Vonage. There is no doubt that these were utterly tragic events, but anecdotes, in a vacuum without critical discussion and analysis, cannot pretend to present an accurate depiction of the whole story. There was no testimony from anyone discussing E-911 failures on traditional wireline or wireless networks. Nor was there any testimony from Vonage orfrom users who had positive emergency response experiences using Vonage. Nor was there any expert testimony about how to utilize IP technology to improve emergency response capabilities. The result was regulation that forced the VoIP industry to stop in its tracks and build backward-compatible emergency response capabilities or discontinue service. I think the ability to use Vonage service from a hotel room in New Orleans, even if it did not have traditional E-911 capabilities, puts this issue in back in perspective. (Frankly, I must commend Chairman Martin for his prescience in extending the deadline to cut off customers just days ahead of Hurricane Katrina.) Now, once again, the VoIP industry has been excluded from the dialogue. As a result, I fear that the public might miss out on the full story and may never understand the positive role that IP technology could play going forward in times of public catastrophe.
http://www.radioresponse.org/wordpress/ Complete archives at http://www.sitbot.net/ Please let us stay on topic and be civil. OM YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS
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- [cia-drugs] wifi voip in New Orleans Bob
