internet outages

[Todd Boyle]

Hundreds of thousands of people emerge from the
storms with heightened awareness of internet, and
communications in general.

The amateur radio people have always captured the
public imagination with emergency communications.

Do you think any company who offered a self-configuring
wireless node with a UPS under it, might find some
customers now?  The physical node could be a utility box
on a mast with a marine car battery on the ground.
It could be marketed through community associations or
local government, or other ways of getting some critical mass
in a neighborhood.

Geeks tend to be either unaware or have undeveloped concepts
about these organizations.   Many of them have been doing
various degrees of emergency preparedness activities anyway.

And the node itself may be more salable to nontechnical
users if it comes with some minimal application interface
for the laptop, etc.

Of course the cellphone people kept their stuff online... but
a lot of people are not looking for "civil defense" police stuff.
We are looking for continuity in Internet access, and this
should be constructed as an edge network to enable
verizon/comcast users to share whatever connections
we have, with the dark areas of the city.

Todd