Wi-Fi can play a big role in emergencies,...
Wi-Fi can play a big role in emergencies, and the U.S. can do more as a nation to “harness our civic instinct to come together in times of crisis to keep data flowing,” former FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in…
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an article posted on the MIT Technology Review website (http://bit.ly/126XB9O). The article was co-written by Harvard Professor Jonathan Zittrain. “We can start with an idea that needs no additional technology,” they wrote. “Many people and companies operate Wi-Fi access points. Each of these points -- whether used by apartment roommates, Starbucks patrons, or cell subscribers who get Wi-Fi ‘off-load’ from their service providers -- is connected to the Internet and often remains so even if cellular voice and data towers are out or overloaded.” The Internet offers “tremendous” potential benefits, the article said. “The same folks who contemplated rushing to a hospital to give blood, or merchants who deplete their stores of bottled water without fretting about the cost, can share their network access in a way that can make a huge difference to fellow citizens in distress. More ambitiously, recall that citizens in the midst of an emergency without working cell service still possess, in their smartphones and laptops, two-way radios that make their cell and Wi-Fi services function. So-called ad hoc networking technology can bind these radios together during times of crisis, creating a network that could be useful even if no one within it had access to the broader Internet."