New York Times Article - September 18, 2005

The New York Times has written an interesting article about WiFi systems and refers to our work, along with other volunteers including the Wireless Community Networks (WCN) project of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, helping to reestablish communications after Katrina. Here are some excerpts.


Talking in the Dark

By CLIVE THOMPSON
Published: September 18, 2005
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/magazine/18idea.html

To understand what makes WiFi useful in a catastrophe, consider some frailties of our regular phone-company communications. Phone systems are reliable on a day-to-day basis, but they have a key vulnerability: They’re centralized. In any city, a handful of central “switches” handle the work of routing local phone calls. During 9/11, several important switches were located across the street from the World Trade Center and were damaged in the towers’ collapse, blacking out parts of New York.

To make matters worse, phone systems are rarely designed to allow more than 10 percent of the population to talk simultaneously, and far more people than that rush to the telephone in an emergency. In the New York City blackout of 2003, while most land lines continued to function, the cellphone circuits were overjammed.

Katrina posed even worse problems. As phone traffic surged, the water was destroying a vast area, including underground phone lines. Mobile-phone networks, too, were ruined, because they’re routed through communication towers that crumpled like paper in Katrina’s 140-mile-an-hour winds. As a final insult, Katrina knocked out the power grid in swaths of the Gulf Coast - which was fatal for phone systems that require thousands of watts of juice. The surviving mobile-phone sites in New Orleans could run on diesel-generator backup, but with just one tank of gas each, they were capable of operating for only a few days. Even the mayor nearly lost contact with the outside world. After their satellite phones ran out of power, employees of the mayor’s office broke into an Office Depot and lifted phones, routers and the store’s own computer server.

-----------------------------------------
WiFi meshes elegantly dodge our phone system’s central problems. They’re low-power and ultracheap - and decentralized like the Internet itself, which was initially conceived to withstand a nuclear attack. You can use WiFi to build a do-it-yourself phone system that is highly resistant to disaster.

-----------------------------------------
WiFi does have its limitations. To begin with, an antenna can communicate with another antenna only if it has a clear line of sight. But because the system is so inexpensive, it wouldn’t be difficult to address this problem by placing antennas closely together in congested areas. Of course, a WiFi mesh wouldn’t work if its users had no supply of electricity. And emergency responders and the military will always need to rely on their own high-quality two-way radios and satellite phones. But for the rest of us, when disaster next strikes, WiFi meshes could be the clever system that keeps people in contact - from house to house.