Category Archives: Transforming Radios

Posts about how IP technology can transform communication and tactical radio applications and performance.

Tactical Applications: A Sea Change

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on March 12, 2010 – 1:54 pm
Filed under Future Communications, Public Safety, Transforming Radios

While the US government has long pushed for increased use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology, an even more dramatic direction is being taken to foment change in the development and acquisition of new technologies to support our armed forces in their defense and public safety roles.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) released a pair of solicitations this week (one for information and another for proposals) that are an attempt to leverage the radical innovation pace of modern technology AND the very powerful standard communication infrastructures that we use everyday.  They are moving to use standard platforms (like the iPhone and Android) and standard cellular networks to deploy networked applications in the support of operations across the world.

This changes the game in so many ways. While previously only incumbents with deep pockets could play—and often with legacy technology  to protect (sometimes invented in previous decades). Purpose-built military technology is expensive (for lots of good and not so good reasons) and once in the field it is hard to consider replacing it. But in the area of communications, applications, and network technology the commercial world has left our military technology in the dust. It’s cheaper. It’s faster to evolve. And it’s robust because millions of us use it everyday.

At RebelVox we see this as one of the key shifts that will bring the strength of dynamic IP-based networks, traditional software development, and rapid innovation cycles to tactical users; bringing the applications and capabilities that we use in our everyday lives into the field effectively.

To read more on this topic, see this article from The Register.

Between a Rock and a Very Hard Place

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on March 27, 2009 – 6:06 am
Filed under Human Efficiency, Transforming Radios, Weak Spots in Tactical Communication Scenarios

Some of the prime motivating factors for our work at RebelVox are stories of people caught without effective communications at a critical moment.

One story is of a team under fire in Afghanistan whose communication specialist cannot get enough radio connectivity to call for help from his point of safety. (The actual Rock.) He has to move out into the open, key his mic, and speak his request, which, of course, puts him in harms way for an extended period of time. He makes the call but is fatally wounded. (This is real story from Afghanistan: news story from the NY Daily News; the official Medal of Honor Page.) In fact, our CEO spent most of 2002 and 2003 on a Special Forces team in the same area where this event took place.

Another is a fire fighter deep in a building skirting around a large air conditioner (or some such) when the call to “get out of the building” comes. She misses it. And no one knows that she misses it. And she never knows that she missed anything.

A firefighting team in California is moving around the back side of fast moving fire through rough and hilly terrain. The plan is to skirt east around the edge of the fire. As they drop into a ravine, the radio call to tell them that the fire has shifted east, and that they should go west, never comes through their speakers.

One key problem in these situations is that our current model for radio functionality (how the comms application works) is that it is live or nothing. If there is not enough bandwidth for the radios to process the media (for both the sender and the receiver) at the moment the words are spoken, then there is no communication.

If the communications could be live but were not required to be live (if the technology in the radios and the network supported this), then, if the connectivity existed but did not meet the very high quality required for live, the communications could come through more slowly (but get there). Then the creation of the message and the use of radio spectrum would not have to happen at the same time: the radio, not the person, might have to get out into the open. Senders could know whether receivers got the message.

We hope and plan to fix these problems with tactical radios (and telephones, for that matter).The results of our solution enables us to change a lot of other things about how radio and telephone communications work. But these stories continue to be a inspiration for us. Get us into the office each day.

PS. For an explanation of what we call the “tyranny of live”–check out this post.

Taking Stuff Apart…

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on March 2, 2009 – 8:09 am
Filed under Telephony, Transforming Radios

I was reading part of Moshe Yudkowsky’s book “The Pebble and the Avalanche” in which he discusses the revolutionary potential of “taking things apart” or disaggregation. He talks a lot about the breakup of the AT&T monolith; and about how internet telephony disassociates the network transport from the actual voice application. This last break up is something we really focus on in our work.

Whenever you are creating something new out of something that exists—there is the issue of how it can be manipulated. How can it be taken apart? Where are the seams? Some of them are amazingly, intransigently invisible—30 years ago who would have thought that you could have a telephone call without a telephone company?

Constantly driving deep into a system over time, allows you to find “disassembly” edges that are not obvious. In communications, the industry has come to recognize a few key elements which were seemingly whole but are clearly not. We are aided by a primary creative force in our communication age, which is shifting communications from  old analog structures into computationally manageable components. This helps us envision elements that come apart:

  • The transport for voice and how the voice is experienced by the user are surprisingly not the same thing. Whether telephone, VoIP or radio, the user experience of the voice application need no longer be dictated by the reality of radio waves or sound transport. Most of our applications don’t actually do much if anything with this fact, but we could.
  • The liveness assumptions of the act speaking in person to another need not always be reflected in a digitally mediated conversation. And we do a little of that with voice, but with a system, voicemail, that still assumes the speaker much be in a live connection with the system.
  • Speakers (initiators) and listeners (receivers) need not pay attention at the same time. We use this fact in text (such as email) but not very effectively with voice.
  • The device and the message type need not be tied together: I do live voice with this device; I only can get or leave voice messages with a phone.  We can pick up our email from anywhere because it lives in the cloud; what if voice were the same. Why can’t I get (or make) my communications anywhere on any device, whether they are live or messaged, but still be able to also get them everywhere?
  • Why are message media (text, live voice, messaged voice, video) tied to different applications? In a purely digital world, it’s all data. Why not precisely the same mechanisms?  And how would that simplify the user experience?
  • In the tactical world, the pervasive tie to “liveness” originated by the nature of radio frequency technology has created protocols dependent on “live or nothing”; what if that was a choice that you didn’t have to make? What if you can have live and, if live is not possible, something much better than nothing?

The second (and third and fourth) step in creating new things by disassembling old things is figuring what to put back together and how. At this week’s eComm Conference, this will be a major source of discussion. As the telecommunications markets, platforms, and applications dissagregate, what shall we all make of it?