(Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
Getting wireless service back online after a hurricane, wildfire, or some other disaster knocks it offline involves many things, but silence isn’t among them. The soundtrack at an AT&T emergency-response exhibit in a parking lot of the former RFK Stadium in Washington was anything but quiet, dominated by the low-pitched roar of diesel generators.
They’re noisy, and they pollute, but they remain the primary way to provide power to a cell site that’s been severed from power lines, and to the workers who have to restore that site and get it back on the power grid.
“We will respond and restore connectivity in 48 hours at the latest,” said Corey Anthony, SVP of network operations, in an interview this week.
Wireless, Then Wires
That means connectivity first, which even for carriers that don’t yet sell satellite-to-phone roaming increasingly means leveraging satellite service.
“It is a really quick way to be able to restore connectivity,” Anthony said, adding that AT&T employs both low- and geostationary-orbit options.
AT&T doesn’t list all the satellite services it leans on for emergency communications. But Anthony name-checked Globalstar, the iPhone satellite-messaging provider that Amazon just bought, and the exhibit featured numerous Starlink antennas and receivers.
(AT&T’s plans to provide satellite-roaming connectivity to its own customers continue to center around AST SpaceMobile; that startup’s ambitions to get its low-Earth-orbit constellation in service by the end of this year took a hit when Blue Origin lost AST’s newest satellite after an April 19 launch of its New Glenn rocket.)
But while restoring cellular connectivity in two days can be doable—in 2020, executives with World Central Kitchen told me that was their usual wait—grid electricity is often more difficult.
“Power typically is one of the long poles in the tent,” Anthony said. So AT&T brings its own “to not drain from the local resources.”
That’s where generators like those shown off at AT&T’s exhibit, each holding 100 gallons of diesel and capable of running three days on a tank, come in. A trailer set up as a mobile phone-network central office, meanwhile, featured racks of servers—the fans for them whining loudly—and stacks of NiCad batteries.
Michael Dubois, a principal with AT&T network technology support, said that vintage battery technology sufficed for this purpose: "Older technology, but they're reliable, and they last for years."
AT&T, like other carriers, also has on-site generators installed at what Anthony described as “all of our key network buildings.”
FirstNet Things First
Unlike T-Mobile and Verizon, however, AT&T has a government contract to operate a separate wireless network optimized for first responders. FirstNet, a federal response to the communications difficulties different agencies experienced during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, provides its customers with priority access to a dedicated set of frequencies, Band 14.
Ken Smith, an AT&T incident commander, pointed to the vehicles painted in AT&T’s bright blue—the display included trailers outfitted to accommodate kitchens, bunks, and showers—and the smaller array of vehicles in FirstNet black, most sprouting satellite receivers.
“We take this sea of blue, roll in to support that sea of black,” Smith said. The desired outcome of that work: “That's 200 dings on cell phones, saying ‘Mom, I'm okay.'”
Were it not for those colors, some of this hardware might have looked more like the property of the DC National Guard. The exhibit included two amphibious trucks that AT&T personnel have used to cross rivers and floods to restore cell sites, plus a 46-foot-long landing craft that the firm bought two years ago to transport up to 20,000 pounds of larger vehicles and gear.
A large fraction of the AT&T staffers I spoke to came from military or law-enforcement backgrounds, with close-cropped haircuts to match and police badges or flags on display in their work trailers. “We are all prior military or first responders,” said Montee Benien, Response Operations Group division chief for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Region 7. “We've had that experience, we've been there.”
A Changing Forecast for Weather Forecasts
AT&T and other carriers have a different symbiotic relationship with the government regarding weather forecasts. “We're never surprised by hurricanes,” Anthony said. “We have an opportunity to prestage assets.” (Wildfires can present more of a surprise.)
Mark Papier, principal meteorologist for AT&T, said his team depends on official data to provide a useful heads-up. “We try to do a forecast that gets all of these toys as close as possible to a disaster without being in it,” he said.
But the Trump administration’s early rush to slash government budgets has left dents in the National Weather Service, including staff layoffs and program shutdowns. Asked if that complicated his work, Papier said things like fewer launches of weather-sensing balloons and fewer meteorologists on call had caused problems “to some degree.” He voiced more anxiety over the remaining staffers trying to carry on their work: “If you're overworked and overtired, there is an existential threat to being stretched that thin.”
Drones and Dogs
The exhibit wrapped up with a few more experimental ventures by FirstNet. One amounted to a reinvention of the cell on wheels (COW) truck, a longstanding tool to add temporary coverage, with wings and rotors.
This Harris Aerial quadcopter drone—US-built and safe from the Trump administration’s ban on importing drones—functions as a flying COW for FirstNet responders.
While the small batteries of most drones severely restrict flight times, this model flies tethered to a ground station, using power over Ethernet to stay up for six to eight hours at a time. FirstNet normally dispatches a pair to a disaster site to allow continuous coverage.
Why not use a balloon that's also anchored to the ground? “The problem with balloons is that they drift,” product manager Arthur Hernandez explained, adding that setting up a tethered “aerostat” would require more people.
FirstNet staffers employ a larger drone from Acecore Technologies to inspect damaged infrastructure remotely. On the ground, they can dispatch a LiDAR-equipped quadriped robot from Ghost Robotics to inspect particularly dangerous places.
That olive-drab robotic dog was the second canine at AT&T’s exhibit, and by far the less furry of the two. The other, analog dog, a certified therapy goldendoodle named Dexter, plays a different role: helping soothe first responders after a rough day at work.
From my two-hour visit to this dog-and-drone show, I can’t confirm how effective the robot dog is in action, but I can report that Dex was a very good boy.