Two Articles on Telecom Reconstruction in N.O. - After Katrina "Some reports on the state of communications infrastructure in New Orleans from the city's CIO." With thanks going to Sean Donelan on Cybertelecom.com :
------ After Katrina, the only communication system still working was a wireless mesh network By Tim Greene http://www.computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobile/story/0,10801,109662,00.html MARCH 17, 2006 (NETWORK WORLD) - When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the only communication system that hadn't broken down was the wireless mesh network deployed in the downtown area to support surveillance cameras credited with reducing the city's prestorm violent-crime rate. Today it still performs police duties, but as the lone public communications system left in the city, it also carries VoIP traffic that is the lifeline for many city businesses, said the city's CIO, Greg Meffert. The storm wiped out wireline phone service and cellular networks, and those that it didn't destroy outright couldn't be kept up because the city couldn't get fuel to the backup generators needed to keep the networks running, Meffert told an audience at a session during Spring VON 2006 this week. "We still have a third to a half of the city blocked out for telecom and power," Meffert said. Now the wireless mesh system made by Tropos supports a radio network for computer equipment in police cars as well as a free municipal Wi-Fi service. The city never tested the network for its current use, but it had no other choice, the CIO said. "It's easy to try something new when you don't have to deal with the old network because it's in the lake," he said. The mesh creates a Wi-Fi cloud over the downtown business district and the French Quarter, with the bandwidth segmented for public safety and public Wi-Fi. "VoIP over Wi-Fi was the only chance we had for talking because it is point-to-point and doesn't rely on sequenced switches like the ones that failed," Meffert said. He said the situation is likely to continue indefinitely because the traditional wireline phone companies say they will not rebuild in the city for a long time. "We're letting this Wi-Fi technology become indigenous infrastructure to help bring the city back," Meffert said. He said businesses have no alternatives, so law firms are actually doing business over VoIP out of coffee shops, "as long as it's in the cloud." Four months ago, the city population was 50,000, and now it's 250,000. "The wireless network is part of what's making them able to come back," he said. --------- [And a perspective from a recent visitor:] Message in a Spray Can By Jennifer Granick | Mar, 01, 2006 http://www.wired.com/news/columns/1,70307-0.html Last weekend I went to New Orleans to visit my college roommate and celebrate the first few days of the Mardi Gras Carnival season. She attended Tulane Law School and moved back to New Orleans three months before Hurricane Katrina hit. In those days immediately following the hurricane, I couldn't reach her. The telephone lines and the cell-phone towers went down in the first few hours of the storm and stayed down for days. Her office in the Central Business District was also hit, so the e-mail address I had for her was offline. I had the number for her parent's farm in Iowa, so I was able to find out from them that she and her family had safely evacuated to Illinois. Within a week, she got a new cell phone with a Chicago area code, and a new personal e-mail address. Thanks to modern technology, we were talking again. Without traditional means of communication, other residents who stayed closer to home resorted to spray paint. Uptown, a block from the flood line, one person had painted the plea "Call Betty" and a phone number. Later, the tagger came back and modified the message to read "All Better." On a house in the Ninth Ward, I saw "Ella Mae?" sprayed on the façade, with an arrow pointing to her name in a different color paint and the exclamation "OK!" Other homes were marked with addresses and phone numbers from other parts of the country. Rescue workers had also relied on spray paint. An eerie legacy of the aftermath of the storm is that every house in the flooded areas, and some in the few areas that did not flood, are marked with an X, the date rescue workers visited the location, the agency visiting and what they found. Most of the houses have a zero. But some say "1 DOA" or "3 dead" or "possible body." Rescue workers didn't have handheld wireless devices to transmit what they found to a networked database of information about what was happening on the ground. The city continues to have problems with phones, regular postal service and electricity. The Federal Communications Commission started a program to offer free phones to eligible residents who lost or never had connectivity. The local post office just reopened, amid complaints that people were only now receiving letters mailed in December. Much of the Ninth Ward still doesn't have electricity. In the Ninth, residents were defiantly reoccupying their homes. Every few blocks we saw people carting out soaked sheetrock, ruined personal belongings and unusable televisions. Still without phone service or electricity, some had posted laminated signs on their lawns reading "We are Back" or "We Are Coming Back." One family had spray-painted the rear window of their pickup truck to read "We R Back. R U?" The movement to reoccupy the Ninth Ward comes at a time when elected officials are deciding whether and how to compensate people for damage to their homes. Officials have proposed forced buyouts, rebuilding moratoriums and other controversial programs. Now more than ever, people in New Orleans need to communicate with each other if they want to save their neighborhoods. The mayoral election is now scheduled for April, and displaced residents are allowed to vote -- if they can figure out how. In short, decisions being made now are going to affect the well-being of almost every resident of the city. Hurricane-related outages are no longer the biggest obstacle to communication. Now it's geographic dispersal, mixed with poverty. Less than half of area residents have moved back, even though many of them want to do so. Almost 29 percent of New Orleans residents live below the poverty line, and the poor were concentrated in the lower Ninth. Forty percent of New Orleans residents are illiterate. Most people cannot afford cell phones (the free phone project, to the extent that residents knew about and took advantage of it, is scheduled to end this week), never mind access to computers and e-mail. In the lower Ninth, I spoke with some well-meaning college students doing community organizing. They were trying to help residents of the area who wanted to keep their land, rebuild their neighborhood and move back onto their property. I asked the activists how they were communicating with people, but they didn't have much of an answer. Getting phones or e-mail to people scattered across the country is difficult and expensive, even if you can locate them. Organizing remote individuals into a politically effective community seems impossible. It should come as no surprise that economic development has left our poorest citizens behind, but the extent of the problem still has the power to shock. The greatest communications system ever created failed the city of New Orleans in the days after the storm, and in many ways remains useless to the former denizens of the Ninth Ward. I spend my days thinking about how to preserve freedom on the internet, but my trip to New Orleans was a visceral reminder that technology can only do so much. At some point, we have to get away from the computer and work hand in hand with our neighbors. ------ Frank A. Coluccio DTI Consulting Inc. 212-587-8150 Office 347-526-6788 Mobile -- NYCwireless - http://www.nycwireless.net/ Un/Subscribe: http://lists.nycwireless.net/mailman/listinfo/nycwireless/ Archives: http://lists.nycwireless.net/pipermail/nycwireless/
