"I Love LA" wrote in message
...

I keep hearing on the news about the massive failure in communications
after
Katrina (and they're also talking about the same thing after 9/11).


My question is... are these people completely clueless?
YES~they are completely clueless.
They technological illiterates.
( for example: Just look at the lack of technical experience of former FCC
commisioner Powell and current commisioner Abernathy.)

Don't they have engineers that they can talk to?

major snip

There are engineers, and other comms folks that they can talk to.
Unfortunately, the higher command political types DON"T talk to them.
They view commo types as techno-GEEKS and idiots because comm folks don't
schmooze or BS and don't have political skills.

The eyes of higher command political types glaze over, and their minds go
blank, when you start to talking about mission critical components, fault
tolerance, system robustness,and critical path analysis.

Comms structures tend to be up high and outside in areas that are cheap to
acquire.
Cheap usually boils down to areas that nobody else wants.
Consequently Mission Critical Towers, antennas, radio transmitters, and
relay equipment tends to be put in areas that are the first to be damaged in
severe weather and are hard to access even under good conditions.

Cheap also means that a of maintenace is "deferred", and a full set of
back-up or even critical repair parts and equipment is not acquired, much
less stored and assembled in a ready to go condition.



They're talking about needing more spectrum for comms. Under those
conditions, no amount of additional spectrum space would make a whit of
difference.

Communications spectrum is really not the problem.
Lack of Bandwidth on the few remaining operational comm systems is the real
problem.
In an emergency there is a greatly increased amount of data trying to go
through the few, much reduced, remaining comm systems

So much for my little rant.. I just can't believe they're griping about
the
government not doing enough to insure comms during an emergency, when in
some emergencies, such as a hurricane, tornado, or terrorist bombing, the
comms infrastructure may be the first thing to go, and there's not a hell
of
a lot you can do about it.


THAT"S RIGHT, but you can have equipment stockpiled and trained
installers/operators ready to go.