Inter-Government Crisis Network

The United States Government has a mandate to serve its citizens and remain in control under whatever disruptive incidents may occur, either within or from outside its borders. In a crisis, government leaders must have access to highly reliable and resilient communications to coordinate effectively among national, regional, and local agencies. Such a communications network is essential to ensure maximum preparedness and rapid response and relief activities.

The need has never been greater. According to a recent Frost & Sullivan whitepaper entitled: The Case for an Inter-Governmental Crisis Network, January 7, 2009, the primary challenge is not the ability of first responders to communicate with each other in the field, but the inability to coordinate multi-agency response efforts at the decision-maker level. Access the whitepaper here.

Path-Diversity: A Necessity in a Crisis

Utilizing redundant or alternate paths to back up a terrestrial network, whether fixed or wireless, is the correct strategy to achieve high availability. However, this is not the case if the paths share common technologies or physical routing, making them vulnerable to sabotage or natural disasters that can simultaneously take out primary and backup systems alike. True path-diversity, and hence highest network availability, can only be achieved by employing alternate technologies and physical routing.

IGCN: The Solution for Path-Diversity and High Availability

Hughes has the solution: Inter-Government Crisis Network (IGCN). IGCN is secure, cost-effective, and is unaffected by events on the ground. It is instantly deployable and interoperable among any number of agencies and levels of government.

IGCN utilizes the unique onboard switching and routing capabilities of the Hughes SPACEWAY^® 3 satellite system to create any number of user groups among crisis-related agencies, which can be immediately activated in any emergency. It is not the Internet—and hence not subject to the Internet’s predictable congestion during a crisis. It is not a cellular or wireless network that is prone to crisis-inflicted logjams. IGCN is physically diverse from the vulnerabilities of even the most robust terrestrial networks.