When Mobility Matters

One of FEMA's first tasks was to set up a disaster field office, its main base of operations. Set up in a Houston shopping mall, the field office accommodated between 400 and 500 relief workers from FEMA, the Small Business Administration, the Red Cross and state and local disaster officials.

It used to take up to five days for FEMA to outfit such a large office with computers and communications equipment designed to connect with the agency's National Emergency Management Information System (NEMIS). Workers from the local telephone company and FEMA technicians would have to wire the space for separate voice and data networks, scurrying in the crawl spaces above workers' heads to lay hundreds of feet of wire. The process was wasteful, costly and time-consuming.

In Houston, FEMA experimented with wireless technology to speed up the installation process. When the agency's disaster workers reported for duty, each was issued a wireless phone and a laptop computer connected to a small number of wireless network transmitters placed strategically around the field office. Disaster workers could take their phones and laptops anywhere within the mall and stay connected. "With wireless, you don't have to run telephone lines inside a building," says Travis Ratcliff, a logistics section chief who worked the Houston disaster. "That saves many days of labor and the cost of telephone wiring." Ratcliff says it took FEMA less than 24 hours to get the office up and running using the wireless solution.

Of course, if a disaster is large enough to disrupt a region's telecommunications infrastructure, finding any information solution-wired or wireless-can be challenging. When terrorists flew hijacked passenger jets into the World Trade Center's twin towers on Sept. 11, FEMA scrambled to set up a disaster field office. But the collapse of the towers knocked out Verizon's main telecommunications switch, shutting down phone service to New York's financial district. FEMA had to rely on satellite communications in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

Nevertheless, FEMA's recent field tests have been so successful that agency officials have decided that in the future, they will always try to deploy wireless networks in field operations.

A Network in a Day

In the wake of the Houston disaster, and before September's terrorist attacks, FEMA had another opportunity to test its wireless approach. On Aug. 12, Washington, D.C., found itself awash with debris after three days of drenching rain that caused flooding and mudslides. FEMA secured an office in the city to respond to the disaster.

"We set the system up in a day," says Thomas Mills, a FEMA network administrator. Mills helped operate a network consisting of a central server in a shockproof case, 100 laptops, 100 phones and five wireless transmitters. The transmitters broadcast both voice and data to the office's wireless devices. Each laptop was equipped with a wireless modem so it could be moved anywhere in the building and still be hooked up to the network.

The agency's successes over the summer in Houston and Washington were just what FEMA Chief Information Officer Ron Miller had hoped for when he helped prepare a business case for the wireless approach. A return-on-investment study conducted after Tropical Storm Allison hit Houston showed that wireless networks would pay for themselves after one and one-half deployments. "We have to use wireless as a cost saver," he says.

The solution also eases some of FEMA's logistical concerns. Before, the agency had to transport two tractor-trailer trucks full of equipment to set up a network. Now the entire system-network, servers, laptops and phones-can be loaded into a prepackaged kit that fits in a single crate, awaiting the onset of an emergency. The networking nodes are made by Avaya Inc. of Basking Ridge, N.J., and the phone system is from Spectralink Corp. of Boulder, Colo. FEMA buys whatever laptops are the best market value at the time it needs them for a relief operation.

Two Options

FEMA's approach to wireless networking suits the agency's needs well, but that doesn't mean it is the right solution for other federal operations.

There are two basic ways to set up wireless networking systems. The first is to purchase wireless connectivity as a service from a standard telecommunications carrier. The second involves an agency buying and deploying its own wireless infrastructure. The first option aims to provide wireless access over a broad area, while the second is designed for deployments to a single building-making it work well for an agency like FEMA.

For agencies that don't need to set up their own wireless systems in remote locations on the fly, but want the convenience of wireless networking, the first option probably makes the most sense. For them, the most important consideration is finding low-cost, high-speed, highly reliable and highly available network connections, says Bob Egan, vice president for mobility at the Gartner Group, a consulting firm based in Stamford, Conn.

These days, wireless telecommunications providers usually fail to meet all of these criteria-their networks often are slow, unreliable and unavailable. "Executives need only to pick up their cell phones and hear the snap, crackle and pop to realize that a data network over [a wireless telecommunications] network will fail without a lot of attention," Egan says. But with the type of setup FEMA uses, the technology is more mature and offers higher speeds.

Even FEMA, though, has limited its use of wireless networks to its field offices. At disaster recovery centers-separate facilities where victims go to apply for aid-employees use laptops, but access NEMIS over standard phone lines, allowing them to view information about the victims they are serving. Likewise, FEMA's cadre of inspectors uses handheld tablet computers, but uploads work to NEMIS each day via dial-up lines. For these two groups, Fullerton and Miller have decided wireless connectivity is not worth the cost or the inherent risks to security involved in wireless networking.

Wireless networking is still in its infancy, but many executives already are excited about its potential. Many IT managers, on the other hand, are more comfortable operating traditional networks of personal computers and have been slow to support mobile technologies. IT managers cannot stick their heads in the sand, Egan argues, because such devices are being attached to their networks even if they don't like it, creating significant security risks. The management of mobility initiatives and wireless devices, Egan says, has now turned into a survival issue.