Even before the Hurricane Sandy disaster, emergency communications systems were already facing serious concerns. This is according to an article by David Talbot in MIT Review, ?Even Before Sandy, Emergency Communications Systems Showed Flaws.?
According to the author, The September 11 attacks and the Katrina disaster highlighted serious problems with emergency communications systems. However, Federal efforts to create a better network for emergency services since then have remained unfulfilled.
One of the critical issues is that many agencies still use systems that are not compatible with one another. During the September 11 attacks, problems included police and fire units using different communications channels?a factor that contributed to the deaths of some firefighters who didn?t receive evacuation messages (see ?Communicating in Crisis?). Similar interoperability problems, as well as poor communications between different levels of government, plagued the response to the Katrina disaster in New Orleans and surrounding areas in 2005.
Despite the explosion in commercial mobile communications in the ensuing years, a nationwide data-capable emergency network is still unbuilt, with many agencies instead using voice-only systems that aren?t always compatible with one another.
After years of partial efforts to upgrade systems in some regions, in February of this year, Congress set aside $7 billion to create a ?First Responders Network Authority,? or FirstNet, a federal office charged with designing and building a true nationwide emergency network. The goal: interoperability across agencies, widespread coverage, and extreme robustness in the face of disaster.
A key question is whether public safety communications systems can coexist with the infrastructure of commercial systems. And there is uncertainty about how robust such a network would be. During Katrina, commercial systems were shown to be highly susceptible to loss of power and backhaul capacity.
Some of these challenges were discussed in our blog post ?xG Releases Publication on Using Cognitive Radios in the Public Safety Sector.?
Daniel Carpini
Marketing Director
xG Technology, Inc.
Tags: disaster response, public safety, rural broadband, tactical cellular
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