IP Transition Poses New Risks for Communications When Disaster Strikes, Simpson Says
The transition to an IP world offers benefits but also new risks for communications failures during and after a disaster, FCC Public Safety Bureau Chief David Simpson said Thursday during an FCC workshop on public safety and the IP transition. An afternoon session focused on disaster communications, with an eye on what the public and first responders should expect.
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"We want to think about the significance of [putting] all our eggs in one basket, an IP basket,” Simpson said. “It had better be a pretty good basket.” Interconnection can come with a price, he said. He cited a recent 911 outage in Washington State, in which hundreds of emergency calls failed to reach public safety answering points (PSAPs). “It would be hard for me to imagine five years ago a failure in computer-aided dispatch in Washington State that would have impacted more than one county,” he said. “Yet … the entire state of Washington was down for 911 for an extended period of time.”
Simpson, previously vice director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), noted that after the 2011 earthquake in Virginia, he couldn’t make a cellphone call for two or three hours because of network congestion. “It was my job at DISA to be able to make calls like that and organize the response,” he said. Network redundancy is critical, he said. “How do we organize ourselves in the future so that we're resilient in the face of disasters that would stress the network?”
"All of us would agree that communications is critical in a disaster,” said Eric Panketh, chief of the Public Safety Bureau’s Operations and Emergency Management Division. “It’s vital to response coordination, within and across organizations. The public relies on resilient communications to reach emergency services in a time of need. Local officials also need to be able to share information with the public that is vital to their safety after an incident. Sometimes overlooked, we depend on communications to connect after a tragedy with loved ones, not just to let them know that we're OK or that’s something is wrong, but to grieve and provide comfort.”
Michael Ernst, director-program management at AT&T, said in any IP system there are “points of failure” in any network, but that can be addressed by putting facilities in multiple places. “Routers and servers and switches don’t like to get wet,” he said. “That’s just a fact of physics, because water and electricity don’t mix very well.” In an IP world “geo-redundancy” is easier to achieve than in a switched network, where the emphasis has always been on “local redundancy,” he said. “We expect that will go a very long way.”
Tony Bardo, assistant vice president government solutions at Hughes, said “path diversity” is critical and satellite networks have a role to play. “Our satellites are 22,000 miles away, they have never been flooded,” he said. Business has done a better job than the government of building in diversity, Bardo said. “A cash register still has to ring, they still want to stay open and they have that intent to have an alternate path in the case that their terrestrial infrastructure goes down,” he said.
PSAPs are using multiple links to prevent failure, said Trey Forgety, director-government affairs at the National Emergency Number Association. “It’s now possible to create a virtual network link that actually spans multiple carriers,” he said. “At our office in Alexandria, for example, we have one TDMA circuit, one cable modem, one DSL connection and a cellular connection that all go into the same box, and it can actually send traffic over all those links simultaneously.”
"IP doesn’t magically inoculate us from some of the core physical infrastructure issues,” said Brian Josef, assistant vice president at CTIA. “We have limited spectrum. We have physical issues that we account for. In hurricane-prone and flooding-prone areas we take steps to raise cell sites so that they don’t get flooded. There’s hardening of towers, etc. … But we certainly should be mindful of that in an IP environment as well."
The workshop also focused on cyberrisks for public safety agencies following the transition. Jeffery Goldthorp, associate chief of the Public Safety Bureau, said one question is key: “How [does] carrying traffic on a managed, carrier-grade, IP-based network, expose it to additional cyberrisks, more cyberrisks than if it had been carried on a TDMA-based network? What we're talking when we talk about an IP transition is a transition to managed IP networks."
Richard Shockey, president of the SIP Forum, said trust is an issue, especially in light of such growing problems as spoofing. “What we are trying to do is to essentially restore the circle of trust between the various entities that represent the communications industry in the United States,” he said. “That whole chain of trust has been fundamentally broken in multiple ways.”