In the wake of recent disasters in both Haiti and Chile, the lack of working telecoms infrastructure has greatly hindered local communication. The first relief workers to hit the ground had trouble talking to each other (let alone the outside world), and that was very bad for the relief effort. Inefficiencies that retard relief efforts result in more death and suffering in times of crisis.
There are two problems that contribute to broken local telecom systems. First, there wasn’t much infrastructure to begin with. Haiti is a poor nation with political risk, and like many such nations, the environment doesn’t easily support investment in large ISP infrastructure. So Haiti had some slow access, but even before the devastation, local infrastructure could not easily handle the increased demand presented by the people flooding in to help.
Second, what little access existed was not designed to withstand natural disasters. Service providers in Haiti are like commercial ISPs everywhere. They favor centralized networks that are easily maintained and controlled (and thus easily monetized). But all those profitable choke points are also centralized failure points, And those
central points of failure are tragically vulnerable at times of natural disaster.
That’s not to say the ISPs are malicious. Various telecoms companies and charities rose to the challenge and poured a lot of effort into rebuilding the local infrastructure. Their approach, though, is to do what they do best: construct big, expensive, centralized investment that will fall over quickly when stressed.
The better solution is for people to use mesh networks (ideally, to be using them even before disaster strikes), in which computers network directly with each other instead of going through the centralized ISP intermediary. Mesh networks are ad-hoc and self-healing, hop out to the world wherever a connection is found, and don’t depend on centralized choke points. If mesh networks were in place in Haiti and Chile, everybody’s laptop would be part of the communications infrastructure, and at the very least people on the ground could talk to each other. Mesh networking is a technology that could save lives.
What’s more, meshes are cheap to deploy and they don’t require centralized ISP investments. That makes them perfect for markets that aren’t supporting the investment necessary to provide the more usual centralized broadband access.
Mesh networking is maturing (see this Ars Technica state-of-the-industry piece on the subject). It’s time to make mesh capability a standard part of everybody’s setup, both to bring access to under-resourced areas and more importantly because doing so will save lives at times of crisis.
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