Subject: RE: [Ieprep] ITU-T Workshop on Telecommunications for Disaster Re lief

From: "Gunn, Janet" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2003 16:53:57 -0500

Could someone who attended this please give us a summary, especially
anything relevant to ieprep.

Thanks

-----Original Message-----
From: Folts, Harold [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Monday, February 03, 2003 8:41 AM
To: ieprep List (E-mail)
Subject: [Ieprep] ITU-T Workshop on Telecommunications for Disaster
Relief

The ITU-T has organized a three-day workshop in Emergency Telecommunications
in Geneva, Switzerland, February 17-19, 2003. You can find more information
at http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/worksem/ets/. The event has a close relationship
with the considerations being addressed by ieprep. It is a fully open event
and ieprep participants will be most welcome to participate.

Hal

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From: "Stuart (Stu) Goldman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2003 09:09:04 -0700

Janet,

I was fortunate enough to have attended, and spoke at, the ITU-T Workshop on
Telecommunications for Disaster Relief (TDR), and I am happy to respond to your
request by sharing my personal observations.  The presentations may be found at:

http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/worksem/ets/program.html

This is my  attempt to distill a few "take aways" from three full days of
presentations.

I found that the workshop accomplished the goal of the organizers by
communicating information between a diverse collection of experts involved in
different aspects of TDR. In addition to ITU-T members, T1, ETSI, and IETF were
invited to attend. We had a bit over 100 people register for the workshop.

The purpose of the workshop was to improve everybody’s understanding of the
telecommunication requirements. Need to have a common understanding if we hope
to agree on solutions. We need to recognize the different national policies. TDR
provides preferential treatment for government authorized users. Funding and
regulatory factors are major issues that need to be resolved. The current
infrastructure will be converting to multimedia, broadband, etc. We must address
the interworking with the legacy networks as well as with the new technology.
Availability, quality, and security are needed for communications during times
of disaster.

Almost every speaker from the user committee mentioned Cyber war, and the USA
ranked its adverse impact on telecommunications as being exceeded only by
nuclear war!

The speakers reconfirmed during a Q & A session that SIP based networks do not
recognize national boundaries. The DTR mechanisms that eventually emerge must be
sufficiently secure so that a country's national ETS is not compromised by
preference communication attacks.

Keep it simple. Keep it reliable. Make it affordable. Make it interconnect. Make
it backward compatible. Need it now.  Some degraded QoS is better than no
communication.

Disasters have a pre, during, and post life. Disasters cause billions and
billions of dollars of loss and loss of life. We need to shift from disaster
relief to disaster prevention.

Emphasis is on decentralized communication facilities. Emphasis is on mobile
technologies. ITU-R is addressing spectrum issues.

Affected countries have tended to have very poor infrastructure to start with
prior to the disaster. Going toward TCP/IP over satellite links. Last mile is
still a problem, which may be addressed by WiFi.

Tools used by different agencies are very different and do not interwork. Need
standardization to be able to coordinate.

Try to use the local facilities and a combination of them for backup should
infrastructure be destroyed. Want something simple to use (5 minutes training),
low cost, world wide cross boarder.

Network saturation and unavailability when disaster strikes is a problem. They
need to be given priority when there is congestion. Mobility, interoperability,
and universal conductivity are required. The network needs different levels of
QoS depending on user and application. Voice is (or shortly will) no longer the
primary communication tool.

Users need simple and cheap systems. The biggest problem is often the power
supply. Voice is needed first and the e-mail, Internet and fax. Survivors also
need access to telephones (mobile stations) to contact relatives. Third world
often is not able to use the existing technology, and does not need even more
complicated systems.

Put the needed capability in the NGN now rather than having to retrofit later!

ETS requirements are not market driven. Needs regulator backing. If the private
sector does not voluntarily respond accordingly, then the requirements may
become mandatory.

Interworking Public Safety Organizations with Different Technologies: Key
problems are more operational than technical. Most of the problems are
communication to remote sites.

VoIP needs extendable labels to indicate that it is a emergency call.

Need to map the PSTN indicator to SIP and back

Voice is the minimum service. Local access and conductivity are essential. SMS,
reliable E-mail with attachments, high-resolution graphics, video needs are
coming. Seemed to indicate that much use of the public Internet will be made use
of rather than a managed Intranet. Some service is better than no service. Multi
media, especially over wireless, is the direction to go in.

Minimize DoS attacks by authenticating user is truly authorized for TDR. In
packet networks the flow of packets also needs to be confirmed as being TDR. In
the Internet the concept of trusted network, as used in the PSTN, is absence.

Cannot obsolete existing facilities are now in use.  Establish technical
standards that are RESPONSIVE to disaster relief requirements. Authentication is
essential to prevent abuse of preferential service. It is better to communicate
with difficulty than to not communicate at all. Keep the local interfaces as
simple as possible and keep the additional costs down. Harmonize the different
levels of priority in the different protocols.  Discussed steering committee
terms of reference to keep the work going and to harmonize the various efforts.

Second workshop mid 2004. Work is contribution driven.  Need more input from the
people with real experience in dealing with disasters.