Volunteers rebuild Gulf Coast communications with wireless nets

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a volunteer group of network and wireless experts has moved from outfitting small northeastern Louisiana shelters with wireless Internet access and VoIP phones to preparing a desperately needed 45M bit/sec wireless pipe for the entire relief effort in devastated Bay Saint Louis, Miss.

"I've never witnessed destruction like this," says Paul Smith, technology director with the Center for Neighborhood Technology , a Chicago non-profit devoted to making cities more livable. He's one of scores of network volunteers from all over the country who are creating one of the few success stories to emerge from Katrina's demolition of the Gulf Coast's technology infrastructure.

As of this week, the emergency management staff of this town of about 8,000 people, plus National Guardsmen; Red Cross workers; and local police, fire and government are relying on a couple of satellite connections, each supporting a 2M bit/sec downlink and just a 512K bit/sec uplink. One of the links had been set up at the Hancock County Medical Center by local U.S. Navy staff. The second was at Stennis International Airport, where the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) is based, coordinating all local, state and federal relief efforts in the area.

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In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a volunteer group of network and wireless experts has moved from outfitting small northeastern Louisiana shelters with wireless Internet access and VoIP phones to preparing a desperately needed 45M bit/sec wireless pipe for the entire relief effort in devastated Bay Saint Louis, Miss.

"I've never witnessed destruction like this," says Paul Smith, technology director with the Center for Neighborhood Technology , a Chicago non-profit devoted to making cities more livable. He's one of scores of network volunteers from all over the country who are creating one of the few success stories to emerge from Katrina's demolition of the Gulf Coast's technology infrastructure.

As of this week, the emergency management staff of this town of about 8,000 people, plus National Guardsmen; Red Cross workers; and local police, fire and government are relying on a couple of satellite connections, each supporting a 2M bit/sec downlink and just a 512K bit/sec uplink. One of the links had been set up at the Hancock County Medical Center by local U.S. Navy staff. The second was at Stennis International Airport, where the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) is based, coordinating all local, state and federal relief efforts in the area.

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Outbound GSM cellular voice calls could be made fairly reliably, but inbound calls were overwhelming the battered cell networks, Smith says.

By the end of this coming weekend, volunteers are expected to have up and running a 45M bit/sec broadband wireless connection hopping from a Bay Saint Louis water tower west some 76 miles to Hammond, La. "We've been given access by the EOC to pretty much the city's entire infrastructure," Smith says. That means the volunteer team can commandeer one of the water towers outside town for the main backhaul connection, essentially a commercialized, high-powered 802.11a 54M bit/sec radio.

These devices, running in the unlicensed spectrum, require line-of-sight alignment. The link will probably make two intermediate hops before terminating in Hammond, La.

Spoking out from the water tower, other wireless links on 2.4- and 5.8-GHz bands will carry throughput to 25 shelters around the town, the medical center and most importantly to the EOC.

In some cases, Smith expects to deploy a wireless LAN mesh, using open source software from the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network project , and hardware from Metrix Communications: single-board computers in a weatherproof housing, 802.11a/b/g radio cards, and Power over Ethernet to simplify deployment.

At each of these sites, PCs, laptops, and a combination of VoIP phones and VoIP-enabled analog phones will be able to access the radio bandwidth through a router or a switch.

Local action

This basic technology pattern and the entire volunteer wireless effort grew out of the decision by a former Mississippi river towboat captain turned wireless broadband provider to set up a similar arrangement at the Mangham Baptist Church in neaby Mangham, La., about 240 miles northwest of New Orleans.