After any natural disaster, Hurricane Sandy for example, one of the main concerns for first, second and all responders trying to help is communication. How will fire, police, Coast Guard and others be able to coordinate efforts if power’s down and cell towers are down? Walkie Talkies can only get you so far. That is where a company like Persistent Systems comes in. It has developed a technology called Wave Relay for setting up a giant data network from scratch within just a few days. It attaches these network radio relays to buildings and gives mobile radio relays to anyone who’ll be using that network.
“We would grab a bunch of guys and we would connect the network making sure that we’re all talking and then we’d just spread out and see how far we can get, and in the case of Hurricane Sandy, we were able to get all the way to south Manhattan and even across into Staten Island and establish communication for the Coast Guard for instance," says B.R. McDonald of Persistent Systems.
You cannot think of the radios like the radio in your car. These can pass data as well, so audio, video and internet connectivity.
Persistent Systems says one of the big advantages it has over competitors, and you can probably appreciate this if you’ve ever tried to setup your home Wi-Fi network, if there’s a barrier in the middle of the signal like a big wall or a mountain, rather than having to power through that barrier, Wave Relay is actually able to figure out a way around it.
The people carrying around the mobile radios become part of the network. The network can use them as it determines the most efficient path from A to B.
“There could be a third point of communication that walks sort of around and creates a 45-degree angle so that I can hop through this one node to my left to hop to the node that’s trying to communicate directly to me," explains Matt Livick of Persistent Systems.
What might be most surprising about the technology is that, in this day and age when so many of our devices are created overseas, the Wave Relay radios are created entirely, from concept to production, inside one, single building right smack in the middle of New York City.