A Day of Irony and Sadness
by Paul McGoldrick

Today is October 24, 2005, although this Editorial will not be published until next weekend. It is the 30th anniversary of one of the worst days I have ever experienced in my life -- and I have seen my share of disasters: an event took place that day that was horrific, and avoidable. It is also seven years before I am legally allowed to talk of that day or any of the scenario that surrounded it -- unlike some of my ex-colleagues who have, prematurely, cashed in on some of their knowledge by making commerce with it -- and it is probably wrong of me to even note that such a day ever happened. Suffice to say that the tragedy was based on a lack of communication or, one might say, a misunderstanding in communications.

It is therefore incredibly ironic that today should be the one that Cisco Systems chose to go public with its Internet Protocol Interoperability and Communications System, or Cisco IPICS. Cisco foresees the combination of voice traffic from PTT (push-to-talk) radios, cell phones and conventional phones over what would effectively be one huge VoIP network. The story is that disparate operations, such as police and fire departments, can communicate with one another -- at long last -- through IP traffic.

Whether IP security can be tough enough for this kind of activity has to be questionable but there are enough scanners around that emergency traffic is rather public anyway. Not so for commercial traffic which is where this system might fly. It will, deservedly, fail in the public sector…

Why? Communications between different emergency departments in New York during the horrors of 9/11 certainly did not exist. Nor could Cisco IPICS have helped anyway. The radio problems that day were due to complete overload and not enough frequencies for the emergency services to use, a fact that the FCC and Congress have decided to ignore in favor of giving more channels to commercial providers. But even if the services had communications with one another on that dreadful day it would not have helped because of total information overload. The confusion would have been more, not less.

Additionally, in the event of a natural disaster -- and this seems to have been a year for them -- one of the first things to go is power (sometimes deliberately to avoid adding problems) and ground-based links, be they in fiber or on a pole. Getting emergency services dependent on such an IP system that could disappear just when it was needed would be reckless and foolhardy, and could cost more lives rather than fewer.

In the commercial sector one can see that the Cisco IPICS could be extremely helpful. Different locations of a company could join their radio networks together over IP and the investment that has already been made in many commercial operations with radio equipment could continue to be amortized, without change. But, again, there is a great danger of information overload without any central arbiter to route traffic and such a system could become chaotic in an uncontrolled communications environment. Cisco, in a very non-technical white paper, gives the example of Schiphol Airport in The Netherlands, the amazingly efficient airport of Amsterdam, where there are 14,000 PTT radios that could be linked together. The chatter would never stop, and why would a gate agent want to know that the ladies' room next to the duty-free gift shop needs cleaning?

I have learned to live, for the most part, with my demons but, believe me, from my experiences thirty years ago, today, unfiltered information can create human disaster.