At last week’s CTIA show, Reed Hundt, a senior advisor at management consulting company McKinsey & Co. and a former FCC chairman, threw down a challenge to the participating infrastructure providers: Figure out a way in the post-Katrina climate to meld wireless devices and networks such that emergency responders can use them cohesively, nationwide, to improve communications and response times during disasters.

Many public safety radio networks are not interoperable with one another. So when an emergency requires the collaboration of multiple agencies and jurisdictions, communications must take place with each entity one at a time, if at all. Today, in many municipalities, even local fire and police departments cannot communicate directly. From a national perspective, attempting to tie local first responders to state emergency personnel, then to organizations such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) gets increasingly difficult.

According to a report done by the U.S. National Task Force on Interoperability, the public safety community has identified the following key issues that hamper public safety wireless communications today:

* Incompatible and aging communications equipment.
* Limited and fragmented budget cycles and funding.
* Limited and fragmented planning and coordination.
* Limited and fragmented radio spectrum.
* Limited equipment standards.

Hundt suggested that the nationwide public safety network might have to serve and coordinate 8 million to 10 million emergency responders, support high levels of reliability and security, and enable ad-hoc networking. He mentioned municipal Wi-Fi mesh networks and setting aside a special spectrum in the 700-MHz public safety band as possible technical options.

Well-seasoned consultant Andy Seybold, president of Outlook4Mobility, who moderated the panel discussion at which Hundt spoke, snickered that “municipal Wi-Fi is its own national disaster,” presumably because he has been known to equate the unlicensed nature of Wi-Fi (at least, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi) with severe interference issues that he fears will not allow Wi-Fi to scale.

Meanwhile, from an organizational standpoint, the federal government this year established an umbrella program called Safecom. Safecom's purpose is to improve the public safety response among all levels of public safety agencies, which includes 44,000 local and state agencies and more than 100 federal agencies, through more effective and efficient interoperable wireless communications.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.