With the recent destruction by Hurricane Katrina, one has to wonder how communication, given all the great devices we have today, remains so poor among victims, their families and local authorities within the disaster areas. I have spoken to many friends with relatives in the New Orleans area, and many still have had no word (or they’ve recently heard) from their loved ones after the evacuation. It’s understandable that phone lines and Internet connections are down and that they are not easily repaired, which is understandable. One common factor among people these days is that those from even the poorest areas often have cell phones, so communication is supposedly easier these days than it was a while back.

Back in the early days of GSM (then touted as Global Satellite Mobile), I remember being amazed by what I had heard and read about a phone you could carry with you that would work everywhere. This phone would supposedly communicate with an array of satellites and give coverage all over the United States and Europe. GSM is an open technology, meaning that no one can own it, much like the Linux operating system. Now fast forward to a few years ago… When I first purchased my cell phone, I was shocked by the substandard service. You would drive along select areas and loose your connection between each "cell" in the cellular system. I still have issues with service in my home (California), but I can walk east about one block and have full service, so it’s not too dreadful. Satellite phones do exist today, but this is a specialized service that is quite expensive and out of reach for the majority of us.

So, what exactly transpired that took GSM and other types of cellular services away from the satellite model and turned our service into a hit and miss network of cells? Capitalism! One word tells it all. The American cellular companies decided they wanted proprietary networks, based on their own version of the "open" GSM. TDMA, CDMA, PCS and other acronyms were being offered and each company claimed their version was the best. The cost of launching a proprietary satellite was far too great for such a small market at the time; so cellular towers were placed in larger markets to provide service. Providers could slowly roll out service to new areas and each hoped they would drive the competition out of business. Had the larger players pooled their finances and partnered on satellite launches, service would be much better than we now have, and they would probably have saved finances and done better overall, due to having an "instant" full coverage network for customers. They could have concentrated on branding and service rather than deploying more cells.

How does this relate to Katrina and the evacuation/rescue efforts? Satellites do not require power from Earth, and cannot be flooded out or blown/washed away by storms. Can you imagine anyone in the damaged or flooded areas with a cell phone having the means to communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world? Surely the relief and rescue efforts would have been greatly improved. People trapped in their attics by floodwaters could have called a national hotline for such disasters (assuming we had one) and rescues could have been better choreographed, thereby saving more lives. How many people have gone back into their flooded neighborhoods to look for loved ones that were already safe? Would the Police have benefited from better communication amongst the department? The only wild card here is that you can’t recharge a battery without power, so cell phone use would be quite limited, of course.

If technology was driven by what‘s best for the consumer and not for Company X, I strongly feel that stockholders and customers alike would benefit. How many lives might have been saved with a reliable form of satellite communication at hand? Unfortunately, we’ll never know.