DSL Prime: After Katrina

Washington D.C. needs to be willing to think outside the telco box in order to learn the telecommunications lessons Katrina taught.

by Dave Burstein of DSL Prime and Future of TV [October 12, 2005]

"People died in the Gulf Coast because their phones couldn't connect,'' Jesse Seyfer in the San Jose Mercury quoted Dave Burstein. "Making sure basic phone service is cheap enough for everyone saves lives. San Francisco could have an earthquake any day.''

Katrina will change everything if U.S. politicians have the courage to follow through. All due credit to the tens of thousands in our industry who did extraordinary work facing the hurricanes, from Ken Moran at the FCC in D.C. to a thousand anonymous field workers on the Gulf Coast. Bill Smith of BellSouth tells me all the companies involved, wired, wireless, long distance, ILEC, CLEC, etc. worked together in an unprecedented way, a model to preserve.

Looking into the face of death concentrates thinking, even if only on a TV screen. Everyone is asking what lessons were learned, but few are willing to re-examine some basic ideas that could save lives and speed recovery.

First: The debate over whether to add a WiFi/Wimax network should be over.

Get those base stations up on light and flagpoles, etc. by whatever means necessary. Invite the Bells to bid, as Cingular/SBC did in San Francisco; if their expertise is the best way to go, great. Qwest is about to offer free WiMax in a trial in Mead, a town of 2,200 in Colorado. If the Bells can't deploy at the right price, persuade Clearwire, Google, EarthLink, Motorola, Hewlett Packard, or the city itself to get this emergency safety net running.

No matter how well the wireline network is built, it will still fail sometimes. A concrete block exchange in Mississippi built like a fortress couldn't stand up to Katrina's fury. BellSouth's lines to the Hyatt Hotel in New Orleans were working fine, but Mayor Nagin upstairs couldn't use them because the hotel switchboard and generator were under water. Mayor Nagin connected to Air Force One via a Vonage phone hooked up over a data line that remained alive in the Mayor s command post.

Redundancy is a cost effective path to reliability.

Second: Keeping basic service affordable saves lives when emergencies hit.

Basic phones rates in the U.S. have gone up 20 percent in the last few years, and current FCC plans will raise them another 10 to 25 percent for ICC and USF. In particular, the "connection charging" advocated by both Democratic Susan Kennedy and Republican Kevin Martin moves the burden of the corporate subsidies to the typical phone user. The biggest lobbies in D.C. are pressing for this increase in phone rates for the poor, but few with power are pointing out most of the subsidy is corporate welfare. Similarly, many countries have basic wireless service at $10 to $15, which is not available from the major U.S. networks.

Third: It's time to give every home voice and data, because it's now cheaper than traditional phone service.

That should be the minimum expected on any network built today, and certainly any with government support. The equipment destroyed by Katrina is mostly obsolete and should be almost fully depreciated. British Telecom is entirely rebuilding their network with a payoff expected in savings in four years. New Zealand has just come to the same conclusion, and Bill Smith of BellSouth hopes the situation allows the time and resources to use today's equipment instead of fixing the existing gear. The time has come for universal broadband service, not just "availability."

Ignoring the poor is bad politics. No thinking American will forget the people who died because no one provided buses for those without a car.

Copyright 2005 Dave Burstein.
The DSL Prime Newsletter is reprinted with permission.

"The power of the printing press belongs solely to those who own the presses"
—A.J. Leibling

The Internet is the cheapest printing press ever invented.