We were lucky to host this summer’s Orange Press Tour of Silicon Valley—even though we’re actually in San Francisco. While they were here our CEO, Tom Katis, was interviewed by Leila Makki of TelecomTV.
Here is a link to the interview which touches upon some of the tactical origins of our concepts. Note that it really is our Tom Katis.
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.
