Our cell phone system? Yeah, not so good

his blog. Apparently, the dude is pretty smart, being a scientist and having penned quite a few SciFi novels. What does this have to do with wireless, you ask? Mr. Brin feels strongly about the poor state of the U.S. wireless communications system. Citing Katrina as an example, he feels that companies could make relatively inexpensive changes that would provide critical changes to the system — perhaps aiding in other disasters, such as we saw last week.

“…. almost no attention has been paid to improving the reliability and utility of our cell networks, to assist citizen action during times of emergency. To the best of my knowledge. no high level demand has gone out – from FEMA or any other agency — for industry to address cell-system problems revealed in the devastation of America ‘s Gulf Coast. A correction that should be both simple/cheap and useful to implement. “What do we need? We need ways for citizens to self-organize, both in normal life and (especially) during crises, when normal channels may collapse, or else get taken over by the authorities for their own use. All this might require is a slight change — or set of additions — in the programming of the sophisticated little radio communications devices that we all carry in our pockets, nowadays.

We honestly wish we could quote the whole damn article. It’s a fascinating read. In the end, Brin advocates a peer-to-peer connection system, whereby people could bypass overloaded — or even nonexistent — towers in order to reach other people in case of emergency. Of course, cell phones are poor transmitters when separated from their towers. So Brin feels that a text message-based PTP system would work better. As we saw yesterday, emergency officials do advise that you use text messages in case of emergency. So how is this different than what Brin suggests? Briefly, it’s that under the current system, the overloaded network would be responsible for transmitting the message. Under the system Brin proposes, it would be a direct peer-to-peer connection. It’s a complicated, expensive idea, which is the likely reason nothing has been done about it. Regardless, it makes sense from a public safety standpoint, and it could go so far as to save our country. Yeah, that might have been a bit dramatic, but hey, it’s at least within the realm of possibility. [Contrary Brin]]]>