NYC wireless efforts and the police
Sascha Meinrath says it would cost $15-20 million to provide all of NYC with a wireless network. It hasn't happened for a long list of reasons — problems with contracts, turf wars, vendors, all kinds of reasons.
According to the NYT, NYC just spent $140 million to build a super-duper hub-and-spoke wireless system for the police to use in the subways, and the city isn't done. It will cost another $60 million to make it operational. And it won't work. So the police on the street won't be able to communicate with the police underground.
Sascha says the reason it's not working is that the super-duper underground wireless network has many many hubs. With lots of hubs, there's lots of interference. Putting all the intelligence in the hubs also leaves the receivers as dumb, lonely boxes — if the hub stops working, the receiver is done for. Sascha's saying that NYC could have a cheap underground wireless network if the city was willing to let the receivers be intelligent parts of the architecture — a mesh, in other words.
I've written before about Sascha's mesh adventures, which I find quite inspiring. I'm confident he knows what he's talking about. But the clash of cultures won't work — public safety people want hard-wired, centralized, hierarchical, stable solutions, not ad hoc networks they don't quite understand.
It's too bad - $200 million for something that doesn't work, and two mindsets that can't understand each other.
More here from Tom Evslin.
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Not really sure what to make of all this. It reminds me of the early days of the railroad, when every company was trying to assert its own power by insisting everyone else use ITS size of rail. Until everyone figures out that there must be a standard, it’s pretty hopeless. But with new technology (and let’s face it, though in our fast-paced world it seems like it’s been around forever, Wi-Fi is still new) there’s always going to be waste initially I suppose. Think how much money people invested in VCRs only to have to replace them later with DVDs. My mother bought a VCR/DVD combo a couple of years ago, which allowed her to make copies of DVDs onto VCR tapes. Wonderful, except for the fact that what she really needed is what’s out now – a dual device that turns VCR tapes into DVDs. I suppose what I’m saying is, even supposing that the NYC project works, how long before we say to ourselves, “gee, that’s really pretty useless”?
Can technology really solve all of our emergency issues? You know, there was a lot of talk of the importance of technology in emergency situations during the recent Virginia Tech shootings. In that case, the university apparently sent out emails to students, but a lot of critics argued that what they REALLY should have had in place would be a text message system. The problem, though, is that such measures are only as good as the people who have access to them. Many students didn’t have a chance to check their email that morning, but so too many people wouldn’t have their phones on, or would be in class and have them turned off, or simply not check the message that came through. It reminds me of the fact that, the year after they introduced the automatic beeping sound on trucks that were backing up, deaths caused by trucks backing up over people actually increased. People adjusted to ignoring the sound so quickly that they actually became less aware.