Probably everybody is following these days the relief effort in Haiti. Unfortunately we all have seen large-scale disasters before, I’m living in Asia where we had not only the 2004 Tsunami but as well the 1999 earthquake in Taiwan and the 2008 in Sichuan, China. What is new in Haiti is the apparent lack of infrastructure.
Interesting to see that despite the magnitude of the quake and the almost complete destruction of whatever little infrastructure was in place before, the Internet survived, almost immediately after the quake the first eyewitness reports came through the Internet.
The traditional approach to emergency and first responders’ communication is very robust, reliable, heavy, military style of communication equipment. In Germany for example just started to build a separate GSM network for Policy and emergency services, a huge task considering that the country is covered already by several GSM providers network.
To me Haiti is a good example that the approach to emergency communication may have to shift, it is practically impossible to have some 50 nations participating in the relief work to agree on a common communication network, leave alone to deploy it in a matter of hours. So it came to my mind, why not using VoIP? It is possible to create a infrastructure with ten thousands of users including an emergency phone book in a matter of a few hours and with inter operational standards like SIP it can be deployed on all kind of devices, platforms and communication layers like GSM, UMTS, CDMA, DSL, PSTN etc. What ever is still there or could be added could be used.
So a lightweight VoIP solution could be a better solution to the closed-user group military style of equipment in use today. I’m not saying that www.c2call.com is the right solution but the use of VoIP in general should be considered and further researched for the benefit of all of us.
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