Nobody Owns Emergency Wi-Fi, So Your County Has to Own It Before the Storm

When a storm knocks out service in a smaller community, there usually isn't a formal person who owns the temporary Wi-Fi problem, so it gets delegated to the county. That's a tough one, because there's not a formal person that owns that in a lot of emergency disaster response and recovery areas. Usually, people are running around trying to figure out how to get power and electricity going first, or how to make sure that water doesn't get contaminated and that sewage doesn't spill. One of the last things anyone thinks about is the communication aspect.

What we've seen, starting with Katrina and again with Hurricane Harvey, is that as more people use digital technology to communicate, that infrastructure is one of the most important things you can deploy. What we just saw in Jamaica was a complete devastation of all services, not just electrical and the entire grid, but all their cell phone towers and their communications and fiber optics, everything decimated. As we move into an era where everyone uses communications for absolutely everything, telecommunications infrastructure has to be one of the most critical things people think about when they set up a response.

The trouble is that when you get into places like small counties in Texas or parishes in Louisiana, they don't have the IT task forces to be able to do this. There are programs that help, ITDRC, what Cisco does with their emergency disaster response, Amazon disaster response, T-Mobile and Verizon disaster response, and a lot of those groups can augment a local effort by sending crews out. But when you talk about a small town out in the middle of nowhere that gets devastated by a hurricane, they don't usually have the funds or the resources, and they don't know who to connect with in order to get this going. Sometimes local IT people step up, and even then, a lot of times they don't have the tools necessary to do it.

What belongs in the box before the season starts?

It's incumbent upon the people who work in these areas to understand that this is something they're going to need: a small go-kit or pop box with a Starlink satellite, or an Amazon Leo satellite, or an EchoStar satellite, something they can turn on to get instant communication. Then the hardware that's going to allow them to spread that communication as far and wide as they can. One of the easiest ways to do that is by rapidly deploying Wi-Fi, because everybody's devices use Wi-Fi and everything out there supports Wi-Fi. You can onboard everyone immediately for carrier offload and critical communications through Passpoint, and then you can start to hang other devices off of there, like CBRS base stations or LMR radios or P25-compatible radios.

What we've seen is that first responders are finally getting equipment in their hands that doesn't just use P25 or the LMR bands. There were a lot of really cool product announcements at APCO in San Antonio, new handheld radios for first responders and public safety that leverage multiple bands, so their push to talk works across a number of different frequencies instead of just one.

Why isn't a cellular modem a backup plan anymore?

Satellite is great because you're communicating with space, and you're communicating with things that aren't connected terrestrially in the area you're in. If they're having a problem with one of their earth stations, they route that traffic somewhere else. If you're using 4G and 5G offload services, you're at the liberty of whatever the local grid is, and that's one of those things we saw in places like Jamaica, where when the entire grid is devastated, even the cell phone towers can't communicate with it.

So a 4G 5G modem is not a true backup plan anymore in this day and age.

You really have to have multiple levels of connectivity, and devices that can aggregate those connectivity components. You have to have multiple egress links if possible, and you have to be able to have all of them working as one cohesive internet connection. Reading through the kind of seasonal guidance carriers put out for hurricane season, that distinction between terrestrial and non-terrestrial paths is the part that decides whether you have a network at all.

Where do access points actually go in a shelter gym?

A lot of times people don't have a lot of options, so they take access points and throw them on the ground, or stick them on a bunch of boxes, or put them in the corners of the facility because that's where people aren't going to be. They run cables to the easiest place they can find that keeps it out of everybody's way. Those are usually some of the worst places to deploy this type of product. If you deploy a Wi-Fi product in the corner of a room, you're losing 50 percent of that signal because it's shooting into the wall instead of shooting out where it needs to be.

When you're deploying Wi-Fi, especially for people who don't do temporary events a lot, you have to think about Wi-Fi like a light bulb. If I'm going to give you a light bulb to light up an entire room, you're going to put it in the center of the room because it makes the most sense. The same can be said for Wi-Fi. If you're going to try to light up a whole room, you put it as close to the center of where everyone's going to be as possible. The other version of the same rule is to compare access points to speakers, and ask where you want the sound to be. That's where the access point goes.

People use the lack of options as an excuse to just throw it out there, and then you end up with a poor quality of service and people can't do what they need to do. If you use a product like WiFiStand and you've got a tripod with some sandbags and some marker tape, now you can put Wi-Fi where it's meant to be, and provide service people can actually use to let their families know that they're safe. The design is obviously helpful, but making sure the access points are where they need to be is absolutely critical, and you can only do that if you have a mounting strategy, on a tripod or a speaker stand or a mast, built specifically to hold an access point at the height where it's supposed to be, versus putting it on the floor or sticking it on a table.

What does a two-hour site survey look like?

You don't have the luxury of being able to do a site survey for something that severe and that time limited. It takes someone who's done this a couple of times, and you have to make quick adjustments and quick decisions. You've got to use best practices that are simple and easy to remember, like the light bulb strategy, and you have to understand the way Wi-Fi transmits and, more importantly, the way client devices are going to receive that signal and communicate back with the access point. As things move on, you put out what you can, and the second you get an opportunity to survey properly, you can move quickly. There are tools out there like Hamina that let you do quick surveys online, where you jump on and load in floor plans and facility plans and get that knocked out pretty quickly.

Capacity planning has changed with the traffic. If you've got a lot of people video calling each other and trying to see each other's faces, which is probably going to be pretty crucial in disaster response, the constraints on those networks are different than they were before. People want to jump on FaceTime, they want to jump on a WhatsApp video call. I remember when FEMA offices in the United States would only accept fax machine transmissions. Now you've got a lot of people uploading photos and videos, not just to see their loved ones' faces, but also for insurance claims, and you've got people streaming video so there's situational awareness. These networks have to be able to handle that, so as you build out the network, you have to build out the density and the capacity necessary to support those services.

What is sitting broken in the emergency management closet right now?

Firmware updates, first and foremost. You can stockpile as much gear as you want to, but the second you plug it in, if it has to do firmware updates, you put yourself at a disadvantage for two reasons. One, the product usually doesn't operate properly until the firmware is updated. Two, you've got bandwidth constraints, and you need enough capacity to process those updates immediately so you can deploy.

What's sitting in those closets is lots of switches and Wi-Fi access points, and people tend to think switches just run the way they're supposed to all the time. For the most part they do. But if you've got old firmware running on those switches and you plug something in there, now you're looking at critical software patches, and you're setting up devices that can be easily compromised. You might be leaving a big hole open where attackers can take advantage of it.

And don't put it past nefarious actors to use a disaster as an open opportunity to do something. That's the best time, when people are scrambling and trying to figure out what's going on. If you've got a piece of equipment that's off patch and all of a sudden you're running critical services across it, that's a key opportunity for a bad actor. All of your network equipment has to be up to date, because a lot of times people look past that.

What happens after you leave?

Once you go out and do a deployment, the thing that's critical is that long tail of support. You have to have someone who can not only understand what the equipment is doing and how it's working, but how to administrate it and how to continue to offer that support and maintenance. A lot of times you get into scenarios where you set something up as a temporary fix, and people love the way it works so well that they just continue to use it. So one of the key things you have to do is knowledge transfer. You have to make sure that if you're going to leave the equipment behind, you need to leave the knowledge behind as well.

Do this

Build a small go-kit or pop box with a satellite link, Starlink, Amazon Leo or EchoStar, plus the hardware to spread that connection as far and wide as you can.

Aggregate multiple egress links into one cohesive internet connection, and stop treating a 4G/5G modem as your backup.

Mount access points on a tripod, speaker stand or mast with sandbags and marker tape, and put them as close to the center of where people will be as possible.

Set a checklist or a calendar reminder ahead of hurricane and tornado season to run firmware and patch checks on everything in the kit, switches included.

Design for density and capacity that supports video calls and photo and video uploads, not just voice.

Do the knowledge transfer before you drive away, and if you don't know what to do, reach out online, people will be happy to guide you in the right direction.