Whatever it Takes

By The PHANTOM –

Sorry, this is not going to be my usual light-hearted finale to this fine publication. My Phantom lair is close to the affected places, and for a while was in the predicted path. The lair in which I was raised was in the affected region. In fact there are other phantoms of my generation and following who were affected. They were inconvenienced mightily but were unhurt. I cannot say the same for many others.

Back at the end of last September and the start of October, the southeastern part of our nation got a rare double whammy, from which it’ll take years to recover. That wicked Helene (the hurricane, not the girl) entered the Big Bend of Florida, drifting up through that state, to Georgia, the Carolinas, and points north, leaving a huge mess everywhere she went. Then to add insult to injury, and more injury to boot, a mere two weeks later, the evil Milton (the hurricane, not the boy) formed in the Gulf of Mexico as a kind of innocuous tropical depression, then suddenly grew into this massive category 5 hurricane, coming ashore at Siesta Key (a great vacation spot—I used to haunt it until they found me out), just off Sarasota, FL, as a very dangerous category 4. It roared across the state, so big and strong that it was still a hurricane when it exited into the Atlantic Ocean. Both were large and powerful hurricanes, which overlapped significant area, causing some folks to deal with two hurricanes in as many weeks. As I write this, people are still waiting for the flood waters to recede, and adding up the damage. Each storm has killed hundreds and caused billions of dollars in damage. Many people lost everything.

All this damage is stretching the resources of both public and private aid organizations. They can handle it, but it is quite an effort. Then to boot, we have this election in a few more weeks—by the time you read this, you’ll know the results. The storms somehow got politicized, and some aid organizations had to temporarily pull people out due to threats of violence.

As soon as possible after each hurricane, crews were in repairing the damage. The electric supply had to come first of course, but after that, telecommunications. And that means our industry among others. Besides local crews, people came in from many other states to help, but they needed coordination with those who knew the local systems best, many of whom were dealing with their own personal tragedies.

Of course, the hams went in as soon as they could and provided communications, but couldn’t fill all the needs. Serving individual residences was secondary: There needed to be some form of publicly-available communications ASAP, payment not possible. Cable companies in the area responded by opening up their existing public Wi-Fi hot spots to all at no charge, and this was one of the earliest means of communications after the storms. Of course, just opening up the hot spots was not enough: You’ve gotta have something to hook the hot spots to. And that meant that some infrastructure has to be gotten up and running PDQ. Sometimes that leads you to doing things that no one has ever thought of doing, but you do whatever it takes in the heat of the battle. It takes people working together, no nicely thought-out written agreements, only whatever you can do now to get up and running. And it takes knowing what it really takes to make a communications path work, regardless of what the standards say. And remember, some of the work is being done by locals who have their own issues to deal with.

Preparation is key here. You’ve gotta understand the technologies you’re working with very well. You gotta know what works and what doesn’t, and the heck with the standards and neat procedures so often followed; you do what it takes and you make it pretty later.

Did this make additional revenue, to open public Wi-Fi hot spots free of charge and somehow get communications paths back up? Of course not. But it was the right thing to do. Whoever has the resources steps up to make it work. Doesn’t matter who gets the credit. Costs can be negotiated by the suits several months down the road. Right now we all work together to figure out something that works.

So I salute you, companies and people of the industry, for doing whatever it takes to get communications up and running ASAP. For doing what you have to do, with the slim resources available, but with things more important: your knowledge, creativity, and hard work.

You never know when The “masked” Phantom is standing right beside you. Sometimes he is in a Zoom meeting or virtual SCTE training session with you. He may be hanging with the suits and other times with the front liners. But be assured, The Phantom knows all and, most importantly, The Phantom sees all!

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