By Mark Hachman 
ExtremeTech.com 
Copyright 2006 Ziff Davis Media Inc.
All Rights Reserved

Five years after the attacks of Sept. 11, a communications system tying together New York state, county and local emergency teams remains barely out of the planning stages, as industry and government struggle at the intersection of technology and bureaucracy.

A $2 billion web of wireless communications — the Statewide Wireless Network — is scheduled to go live across the whole of New York in August 2010. Although New York City will be one of the first locales to be tested, the implementation is still in its planning stages, officials involved with the project said.

For several years, companies have been working to develop so-called "mesh networks," self-healing networks of Wi-Fi, cellular and dedicated wireless backhauls that can intelligently establish themselves and route data according to what repeaters are available.

The mesh networks are designed to serve as a glue tying together communications and data from a disparate set of agencies, all using different systems that must work together in an emergency.

For example, Marin County, Calif., uses an 800-MHz network to tie together its police, firefighter, and emergency workers. But its neighbor across the bay, Oakland, uses an incompatible 420-MHz network, preventing rescue workers from the two communities from talking to one another via radio, according to a wireless industry executive. Like VOIP systems from Skype or SunRocket, SWN and other similar networks use a "gateway" device to transform ordinary radio communications into data traffic, that can be routed to the appropriate user or group.

Establishing the SWN, which began work in 2000, and was fast-tracked after Sept. 11, is seen as an important step in modernizing the state's communications systems. M/A-COM, a division of Tyco Electronics, has been asked to deploy the system. But even after Sept. 11, the network is still being designed to tie together the state's resources, and not necessarily federal agencies.

"The network is being built for state agencies," said Rob Roddy, a spokesman for the New York State Office of Technology, which is overseeing the project. "Local governments can become partners, the same with federal agencies. They have the same ability to become a partner with the state, and to use the system in that area."

The problem, however, is that no single technology can be called a magic bullet.

According to the official Federal Emergency Management Agency's report on the reactions of first responders to the New York City, Pentagon, and Shanksville, Penn. accident scenes, it was the presence or lack of an organized command structure — and by extension, a communications structure — that helped determine the success of the operations. Within New York City, a temporary command post set up within the lobby of the WTC 1 tower within four minutes was destroyed when the second plane hit WTC 2; the collapse of WTC 1 destroyed the more permanent command center housed in a building across the street.

By contrast, the quick establishment of a command structure at the Pentagon, combined with a network of radios issued specifically for the purpose of tying together the 60 or so agencies responsible for disaster recovery, was identified as a key success.

But according to FEMA, communications management is as important or more so than simply pushing information to first responders. In New York City, the knowledge that plane had collided with a skyscraper on Sept. 11 was clearly evident. Enthusiastic off-duty firefighters, retired police, and paramedics rushed to the scene, while radio dispatchers were either ignored or talked into routing crews to the site, adding to the confusion, the FEMA report says. But at the Pentagon, the FBI special agent assigned to the task as well as the head of the Arlington County Fire Department had previously met and jointly attended counter-terrorism training seminars, establishing a smooth working relationship.

"Part of it is technological and part of it isn't," said James O. Ellis III, the research and program director for the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, a non-profit agency set up in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing that has prioritized efforts to help first responders. "It's not a matter of people getting people talking to everybody else. At times, you don't want people to talk to everybody else."

The SWN is just a small part of a nationwide program called the National Incident Management System, authorized by President George W. Bush in 2003.