Hurricane Katrina’s devastation was tragically comprehensive. The Category 3 storm hit the Southeast Louisiana coast on August 29, 2005, leaving an estimated US$75 billion in damages and 80 percent of the city of New Orleans flooded. And in the aftermath, when first responders arrived to begin to pick up the pieces and repair the city, there was little or no communications infrastructure working. Katrina reportedly blew away more than 1,000 cellular towers, 3 million terrestrial phone lines, and 38 emergency 911-call centers.

Holiday Weekend Turns Into A True Labor Day

On September 2, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) called on QUALCOMM^® to deployable emergency cell service in the region. QUALCOMM, in turn, called on ViaSat Inc. to work together to bring some of the first wireless communications to relief organizers.

Throughout the next two days - the Labor Day holiday weekend in the U.S. – engineers from the two California-based companies worked around the clock to put together a quickly-deployable system that could be transported to the devastated region. The QUALCOMM Deployable Base Station (QDBS^TM) portable cellular system was paired with transportable ViaSat LinkWay® Ku-band satellite terminals for backhaul into the terrestrial grid. The complete system that would head for the devastated Gulf Coast was contained in five transit cases; two for the cellular system, one for the LinkWay modem and baseband equipment, and two for the satellite antenna and RF electronics.

On September 4, successfully integrated for the first time and tested in San Diego, the system was ready to ship. QUALCOMM chairman Dr. Irwin M. Jacobs provided the use of his private jet to carry the system, along with generators, 400 CDMA phones, and technical personnel from QUALCOMM. With Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport closed, the first stop was Baton Rouge. A helicopter continued the trip from the Louisiana State Police headquarters, flying the people and equipment to an emergency operations center in St. Bernard Parish.

In the meantime, a parallel effort was under way to install a second ViaSat terminal on the roof of a QUALCOMM building in San Diego. It would serve as the other end of the satellite backhaul, tying the system into the Public Switched Network (PSTN) for voice calls and Internet access.

With one final ingredient – a Cisco router – hand-carried via helicopter to the St. Bernard Parish site on Thursday, the installation was complete and the crew was ready to hand out phones on Friday. Cellular spectrum was provided by operators including ALLTELL, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint Communications.

The initial system integration between the satellite and cellular pieces took a bit more time before the crew could get it on the air the first time. However, once the system was complete, FEMA personnel were able to use it and, when necessary, tear it down and reinstall it in a new location, with no help from QUALCOMM or ViaSat personnel. The entire system was built back up and was on the air within two hours of the move to a new Parish headquarters.

Cellular/Satellite System Overview and Description

The QDBS is a CDMA2000^® cellular system that includes a cell site, call processing hardware and a soft switch. The system can serve users in a Pico cell configuration, with a service area in a maximum radius of 1 kilometer from the base station, or a Macro cell with a 10 to 15 kilometer service radius. The temporary “dome” of communications it creates also can be shaped to cover just a desired geographic area or population.

The QDBS handles a combination of voice and data, and can provide secure voice calls up to Type 1 levels. The first system deployed for FEMA can process up to 150 simultaneous mobile calls, 46 mobile to landline calls, plus wireless data.

The satellite component is a Ku-band ViaSat IP SATCOM Flyaway Terminal. The standard flyaway is totally plug-and-play, featuring a ViaSat LinkWay^® modem, TCP-PEP for IP acceleration, router, and Ethernet switch. The antenna is a 1.2-meter auto-acquiring antenna that can be deployed and operating in less than ten minutes with one push of a button and minimal operator training.

The LinkWay system features full-mesh (hub-less) communications that reduces network delay to a minimum due to a single hop from terminal to terminal. ViaSat Dynamic Bandwidth Resource Allocation (DBRA) technology shares bandwidth among remote terminals and adjusts the size of the satellite channel to match data traffic so there is no need to acquire and pay for extra bandwidth margins to accommodate peak traffic. At the “gateway” end of the backhaul, Cisco call management hardware is added to feed incoming calls into the PSTN.

Relief workers could access the network either through, CDMA2000 commercial phones, or by using QSec^®-2700 secure phones from QUALCOMM (for mobile to mobile calls only). For Internet access and high-speed data services, the workers were issued wireless aircards to fit PDAs or laptop computers.

Since the first crisis situation, the two standalone products have now merged to form a complementary system, with several more follow-on installations for additional FEMA sites and for the U.S. Northern Command. Now the quick-deploy cellular/satellite system can be a communications lifeline in any area hit by a natural disaster or other catastrophic event.

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