Lately, there has been some debate about the continuing relevance, or lack thereof, of the EMCOMM role of Ham radio. Many people seem to focus on the fact that in recent hurricane events, the Houston area suffered no major outage of cell or public service networks. People have claimed that the cell system is now so robust, public safety communications networks are so reliable, and with the coming of FirstNet, that there is little likelihood that Ham radio will be ever called upon for an meaningful EMCOMM role.
Last week I was down in the Pacific Northwest, visiting family. Late at night on Dec 27, I got an emergency alert on my cell phone, that 911 service was unavailable. It seems 911 was out in much of Washington state, and also in several other western states as well.
See https://www.geekwire.com/2018/widespread-911-outage-hits-washington-emergency-alerts-sent-smartphones-friday-night
Century 21 hasn't given many details about the specific cause, but some reports claim a single network card sending bad packets:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/centurylink-outage-caused-bad-networking-card,38306.html
While a 911 outage is not something that Ham radio would be able to deal with, this outage does speak to how vulnerable our public safety systems really are. You can harden individual cell sites till the cows come home, but a single point of failure can still disable an entire emergency system over a large swath of the country. And note that this appears to be a garden variety hardware failure. In this age of cyber war, we also need to think about what could happen if these systems were under malicious attack.
Here in Alaska, not long ago we had a mini version of this. A single powerline transformer failure cut power to GCI, one of our major communication providers. This knocked out internet for many parts of the state. GCI had a back up power system, but a single switch in the GCI system failed. It took hours to fix the problem.
These kinds of failures, along with hurricane damage to power and cell systems in Florida, indicates to me that there is still a valid and important role for Ham EMCOMM. While cell, internet, and public safety systems in many parts of the country have achieved a high degree of reliability, the complexity and interdependence of these systems means that there are still multiple points of failure.
Don't drop out of ARES and/or RACES just yet!
Last week I was down in the Pacific Northwest, visiting family. Late at night on Dec 27, I got an emergency alert on my cell phone, that 911 service was unavailable. It seems 911 was out in much of Washington state, and also in several other western states as well.
See https://www.geekwire.com/2018/widespread-911-outage-hits-washington-emergency-alerts-sent-smartphones-friday-night
Century 21 hasn't given many details about the specific cause, but some reports claim a single network card sending bad packets:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/centurylink-outage-caused-bad-networking-card,38306.html
While a 911 outage is not something that Ham radio would be able to deal with, this outage does speak to how vulnerable our public safety systems really are. You can harden individual cell sites till the cows come home, but a single point of failure can still disable an entire emergency system over a large swath of the country. And note that this appears to be a garden variety hardware failure. In this age of cyber war, we also need to think about what could happen if these systems were under malicious attack.
Here in Alaska, not long ago we had a mini version of this. A single powerline transformer failure cut power to GCI, one of our major communication providers. This knocked out internet for many parts of the state. GCI had a back up power system, but a single switch in the GCI system failed. It took hours to fix the problem.
These kinds of failures, along with hurricane damage to power and cell systems in Florida, indicates to me that there is still a valid and important role for Ham EMCOMM. While cell, internet, and public safety systems in many parts of the country have achieved a high degree of reliability, the complexity and interdependence of these systems means that there are still multiple points of failure.
Don't drop out of ARES and/or RACES just yet!