Community Wireless Emergency Response

Sascha Meinrath of CUWiN has written up a brief post on the lessons that we’ve learned providing ad-hoc disaster recovery. In coordinating much of the deployment effort and interviewing people who are on the front lines, he’s discovered a number of interesting things about how the US responds—both officially via FEMA and other organizations, and unofficially via Community Wireless Network (CWN) groups and WISPs—to emergencies. This is not unlike what NYCwireless found out about providing support networks for businesses immediately after 9/11 in downtown New York (though of course the scope of the disaster was far more constrained in New York).

I’ll quote Sascha’s lessons learned here, since they really are worth repeating, and indicate why both CWNs and modified spectrum policies can be a critical component to helping respond to disasters:

• 5-9s infrastructure (i.e., networks that are fully operational 99.999% of the time) is a myth.
• Volunteers working on shoe-string budgets and donated equipment can, under the right circumstances (especially in chaotic situations), be far more effective than “official responders.”
• Top-down organizing is often far less efficient than distributed (flat) hierarchies for some facets of disaster response.
• FEMA disaster response coordinators often engage in systematic and capricious discrimination against so-called “unofficial” responders—often leading to a degradation in disaster response and harm (both emotional and physical) to disaster survivors.
• The rigidity of the “official” disaster response continues to hamper core mission objectives—even today. For example, the only supported browser disaster survivors can use to apply for FEMA assistance is IE 6.0 (in violation of the government’s own Section 508 accessibility rules)—you can check out this out for yourself at: http://www.disasteraid.fema.gov/famsVuWeb/integration. FEMA was aware of this problem by September 8th, but has still not fixed the problem—meaning that Mac users as well as Linux and other OS users will have trouble even gaining access to disaster aid.
• Ad-hoc (wireless) networks were often the first telecommunications infrastructure made available to evacuees, beating out the major providers by days (and often weeks).
• Had a diverse array of telecommunications infrastructures been in place, the cataclysmic failure may have been avoided. In addition, networks that are set up to “phone home” to central locations/servers are prone to failure when most needed.

• The telecom incumbents are spending a ton of time & energy to obfuscate these issues and are conducting extensive lobbying efforts to spin this tragedy to their own advantage. Especially important to them are preventing the growth of unlicensed spectrum, ad-hoc networking technologies, and bandwidth-sharing infrastructures.