[HOURLY UPDATES POSTED at www.cuwireless.net]

I'm working on coordinating a group of folks to head down to the NOLA area... CNT is sending an advance team down to Rayville, LA and we're taking things from there. If you want to help, let me know -- our main need right now is funding (we're currently paying for everything out of our own pockets). More details on the CUWiN website. Other folks are working to set up a new LPFM radio station at the Astrodome, but need 10,000 radios (and the batteries to run them) before the authorities will allow them on the air. If you have leads, let us know.

Hi all,

For the past few days I've been increasingly swamped with scores of requests, questions, and ideas about CUWiN, New Orleans, and rapid deployment of telecommunications infrastructures in crisis situations. Here's very brief answers to some of the basic questions folks have been asking:

Q: Would CUWiN's system work as a disaster recovery telecommunications infrastructure?

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Two recent blogs, one by Phil Windley and the other by W. David Stephenson comment on the possibilities for utilizing ad-hoc networks (and CUWiN, in particular) for responding to situations like Hurricane Katrina.

Interestingly enough, over two years ago (back in 2003) CUWiN partnered with a local hospital to put in a grant application to the Federal Government to build this exact type of ad-hoc networking system. CUWiN would have made it all open source and freely available to anyone in need -- unfortunately the idea was not funded. In a nutshell, mobile wireless CUWiN nodes (run on batteries -- current solid-state CUWiN nodes run on anywhere from 2-14 watts of electricity depending on the hardware) would be deployed in key locations to form a mesh infrastructure; and wireless-equiped Palm Pilots would be used to virally update first responders with needed information in rapidly changing disaster recovery situations.

It took me some time to track down the original notes (in all of their chickenscratch grandeur); but here it is:

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