KATRINA'S
AFTERMATH
Wireless Broadband Rises
to Challenge Land Lines
Firms set up
networks to help rescuers. Some see an opportunity
to replace the old system.
By James S. Granelli, Times
Staff Writer
As telephone and
wireless companies scramble to repair their
hurricane-battered networks along the Gulf Coast,
some of them are calling up the future.
Wireless broadband — high-speed Internet connections
that transmit voice calls and data — is being set up
for emergency crews in New Orleans and the Gulf
Coast as well as for residents in Mississippi's
Biloxi-Gulfport area.
Networks relying on such technologies as Wi-Fi and
WiMax can be established faster and more cheaply
than crews can right telephone poles and cellular
towers or bail water out of flooded switching
stations.
And they are heralded by some as successors to the
nation's extensive, but antiquated, tangle of copper
telephone lines and the metal forest of mobile phone
towers.
"Why not build the next-generation phone system
now?" asked Mohammad S. Shakouri, an executive at
wireless gear maker Alvarion Inc. and an official in
the trade group WiMax Forum.
Shakouri and other industry experts contend that the
devastation of Hurricane Katrina offers a chance to
build the sort of modern network that phone and
cable companies have promised for years. Such a
network — whether wireless or fiber-optic — could
deliver movies or medical records at speeds hundreds
of times faster than current Internet connections.
Telecom executives and analysts, though, aren't so
sure it's the right time or place.
"Having wireless broadband would help some of these
disaster situations," said Forrester Research Inc.
analyst Charles Golvin. "But it's not the panacea."
At BellSouth Corp., Chief Technology Officer Bill
Smith said the first priority was to restore phone
service quickly to the thousands still cut off. "The
best thing for us economically and the quickest
thing from a customer service view is, if the lines
are just down, put them back up," he said.
The company considered installing wireless broadband
in rebuilding, Smith said, but it found that it
could recover most of its fiber network. The
technologies will be used eventually. "I'm a big fan
of WiMax," he said.
So are thousands of rescue workers and evacuees.
Wireless allows people at Red Cross centers
nationwide to check in with loved ones by e-mail or
phone calls and to seek federal aid online.
Residents still in Biloxi and Gulfport will be able
to do the same as early as Saturday.
"Wireless broadband is not a mainstream service
yet," said Chris Rittler, a vice president at
wireless gear maker Tropos Networks Inc. "But with
the mass destruction there, it's going to play a key
role in communications."
And it is likely to do so for weeks, exposing
thousands of people to uses beyond trolling the
Internet in a coffee shop.
"One of the huge advantages to wireless broadband is
that you can get it up and running really quickly,"
said Lindsay Schroth of research firm Yankee Group.
"But how it develops in the long term there depends
on how badly the infrastructure is damaged, and we
don't know the answer to that yet."
SkyTel Corp., a division of long-distance carrier
MCI Inc., opened a wireless site Thursday at the
Lamar Dixon trade center outside Baton Rouge, La.,
where state and federal workers process New Orleans
evacuees. "Government people were all smiles and
just elated that they had Internet service again,"
said SkyTel's president, Bruce Deer.
He said he expected to have a Wi-Fi mesh system — a
network with numerous antennas, or nodes, to reroute
traffic quickly — running by Monday in downtown New
Orleans at the Louis Armstrong International Airport
and in the Biloxi-Gulfport area. Such a system would
give rescue workers and residents a constant
connection to the outside world.
"At some point, from a strategic vision, it
would be an objective to have the city and the Gulf
Coast entirely covered," Deer said. "But we're going
to do a handful of cities first."
Wi-Fi, typically used as high-speed hot spots in
coffeehouses, bookstores and airports, also is being
used with mesh technology and with boosted signals
to cover wide areas, including entire cities.
Antennas need to be in sight of others on the
network to provide service. WiMax is designed to
carry much more traffic over greater distances and
doesn't require a line of sight to be established.
Intel Corp., a key backer of WiMax, is
sending wireless gear to the disaster area as well
as to 200 Red Cross sites nationwide. The company
also is sending 4,000 laptops to those sites.
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