Depois das Tsunamis e do Katrina, recente infraestrutura de redes sem fio ajuda a comunidade no desastre da queda da ponte em Minneapolis. Mais uma matéria mostrando o uso de tecnologias móveis e sem fio em situações de crise.
Vejam a matéria completa na Computerworld:
Trechos:
“A new Wi-Fi network in Minneapolis — only partially completed and just two months old — is nonetheless giving the city critical help in responding to this week’s collapse of the I-35W bridge. The network helped the city with communications, moving large mapping files to the recovery site, and is supporting wireless cameras that are being installed to help with recovery operations. The city is deploying the Wi-Fi network via a contract with US Internet Corp. throughout its 60 square miles. While only part of it is now up and running, one of those areas is in the downtown area near the scene of the bridge collapse Wednesday evening.
“Thank goodness we had it in and that this piece of the network was already up and operational,” said Minneapolis City CIO Lynn Willenbring. “We could not have been as effective if it were not for that.”
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One of things that quickly became important was wireless access. Minneapolis is the anchor tenant of the Wi-Fi system and has a certain portion reserved for its use. The network is open to subscribers who pay a monthly flat fee and there were 1,000 subscribers on the system the day of the collapse. One of the arguments for building such networks is help in an emergency, and Willenbring said that’s been the case in Minneapolis. On the first night of the disaster, US Internet opened up the network so anyone could use it for free; the number of concurrent users quickly grew to 6,000, said Willenbring.
“We have been able to get information to the command center readily and we are talking heavy files, GIS-based mapping … that are just critical,” said Willenbring. The Wi-Fi network is also now supporting webcams.”