When disaster strikes, why doesn't Thailand learn its lessons?

Disasters. With the Indian Ocean earthquake back in 2004 and the resulting tsunami, one would think Thailand would have learned a thing or two about handling disasters. Perhaps, but many of those lessons were not put to use when the floods hit the country last week.

One thing that is sorely lacking is an emergency communications network. The country is lucky that the floods have spared most of the communications infrastructure and allowed people to continue to use mobile phones and have access to the Internet. But what if there was a more serious disaster that knocked out the communications infrastructure?

There are two lines of thought when it comes to emergency networks.

Many countries use Tetra, terrestrial trunked radio. It is a digital mobile standard designed for use by police, fire, ambulance and other emergency forces. Like the consumer world, Tetra has evolved from being an analogue system to one with slow data and more recently to high speed data, TEDS (Tetra Enhanced Data Services). The design goals are quite different, going for coverage and penetration rather than capacity. TEDS devices in cars can actually act as repeaters for handheld units so the officer going into a scene is not cut off from the network. It also allow for much higher (physical) speeds, such as in helicopters than regular GSM phones.

In Thailand, Tetra is used at Suvarnabhumi airport and had a baptism of fire. On the opening day, the fixed line phone system crashed and all that was left to keep the airport running was the Tetra network.

Germany has deployed a Tetra network covering pretty much the entire country. The only way to make it economically viable was to share its use between all emergency services, not just police.

Tetra is an open standard, with many companies offering handsets and base stations that can interoperate.

The United States has adopted a different approach, phasing in a fourth-generation 3.9G LTE network on reclaimed 700 MHz UHF TV frequency. It is LTE but on a separate frequency. This means that it can take advantage of economies of scale and technology advances in the consumer world, but by having dedicated spectrum, it will not be clogged up with civilian traffic and the network design can be quite different.

Should Thailand launch a similar kind of network? Nationwide Tetra or LTE, or even both? In one demonstration, Motorola used consumer 3.9G and Tetra together with high-definition videos broadcast over LTE or WiMax with failover to Teds and Tetra if the civilian network went down.

During normal periods, it would be cheaper to use the public phone system, but when there is a large-scale emergency across many provinces and the phone networks go down, we need a network that can go beyond a small city that current systems work in today. Ninety nine percent of the time, such a network is not needed - but when it is needed, it can be the difference between life and death.

Motorola has a system, PremierOne, that uses Tetra and Teds (and other technologies) to integrate everything into one system. For instance, it can control all the CCTV cameras in an area so that when there is an incident, all cameras that can see the incident immediately turn towards it. It can use Tetra and Teds and set up a virtual perimeter. When any unit crosses the perimeter, data can be automatically pushed to the handset, for instance a picture of a suspect and case details.

In a way, it is better than science fiction and it is available now. One only wonders if the multitude of CCTV camera systems springing up in Bangkok - or the deep south, for that matter - are integrated into a single command and control centre, or if they are all separate?

Why is PremierOne not deployed in the deep south? Such a system would help support the troops there and save lives. Or has everyone become accustomed to the daily fatalities that hardly even make the news anymore?

Information is crucial - particularly the right information. Having a dozen different official hubs of information is not a good thing. Thankfully, this time round we seem to only have two - one by the government and the other by the private sector. That is much better than in 2004. But what of communication between the organisations.

Post-2004, a project sprung up, Opencare. It was not about showing off tangible mashups like Google Crisis Response, but about linking aid agencies together through well-defined schema.

Today we take mashups (in the consumer world) and Service Oriented Architecture (in the corporate world) for granted. But the magical meshing of two different services does not happen easily. The interfaces and the data standards need to be defined clearly and precisely for this to work. Opencare was all about this - creating an XML Schema for disaster management.

Try searching for "XML Schema Opencare". Most of the posts about it were dated 2006 at the latest. It was a very important idea that began in the wake of the tsunami but fizzled out. Thailand had a chance to take the momentum of the tsunami and become a leader in emergency data management but, alas, people quickly forgot about it.

The country got off lightly, relatively speaking, and the traditional networks and procedures just about coped with the floods. But Thailand might not be so lucky next time. Perhaps now is the time to invest in and complete the Opencare project. Time to use technology, such as PremierOne, in the deep south to bring about peace.

Source: www.bankokpost.com