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March 17, 2006
Greg Meffert Receives First "VON Medal of Honor"
"If you cut 2 inches or 10 inches out of the string, it don't matter, the tin cans can't talk."
- Greg Meffert, Deputy Mayor and CIO, City of New Orleans, speaking at Spring VON yesterday (noting the single point of failure implicit in the linear structure of traditional telecommunications networks)
Yesterday, pulvermedia awarded the First "VON Medal of Honor" to Greg Meffert for taking decisive and immediate action to deploy IP-technology during a public crisis to ensure ongoing government communications between the City of New Orleans and the outside world.
For those of you who are not aware of Greg's valiant efforts during Katrina, he is the New Orleans official who figured out how to maintain communications with the outside world when telecom networks failed during Hurricane Katrina. (Greg has more recently been instrumental in rebuilding New Orleans communications infrastructure and in attempting to bring WiFi and other wireless technology to help transform communications with the City.)
Here's the story of Greg's efforts, as best I can recount:
Greg broke into an already looted Office Depot in New Orleans; removed the store's own, and only remaining, Cisco router (all the other equipment already having been looted); found a single live connection at a Hyatt hotel; downloaded a Vonage soft-client; and established communications with the outside world, including President Bush. (I guess this also makes Greg the only person officially acknowledging that he looted during Hurricane Katrina. Talk about the necessity defense to criminal offenses!)
What I find particularly poignant (from the perspective of someone ensconced in the VoIP debates) is that only three days before the FCC (at the request of the VON Coalition) had extended the E911 deadline for VoIP users to explicitly acknowledge to their VoIP service providers that they understand the E-911 limitations of their VoIP services. What would have happened if the FCC had not granted the time extension and the Vonage service of the City employee had been disconnected due to non-compliance with the FCC rule? I still hold out hope that the FCC and others in government will find a new appreciation for the enabling (albeit it differentiated) capabilities of IP technology and the resilient and open Internet and what is means when "voice really is just an application" and how useful VoIP can be when deployed during an emergency.
I was in fact quite heartened by Chairman Martin's recent statement at the last FCC Katrina Hearing: the Katrina hearing:
"I would also like to see a greater use of IP technologies that are
capable of changing and rerouting telecommunications traffic. In the
event of a systems failure within the traditional network, such IP
technologies would enable service to be restored more quickly and would
provide the flexibility to initiate service at new locations chosen by
consumers."
Amen!
Jim Kohlenberger and Greg Meffert
Greg Meffert
Tags: voip, von, New Orleans, Greg Meffert
(c) 2006 Jeff Pulver. All Rights Reserved.
(This blog posting is copyright protected by Jeff Pulver. Portions of this blog posting may be quoted or abstracted if attributed.)
Posted by jeff on March 17, 2006 11:15 AM | Permalink
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Comments
This pretty much says it all. http://theamericanzombie.blogspot.com/2006/07/imagine-this.html
Posted by: Nola at October 7, 2006 09:37 PM
ditto Mr. Holcomb, does anyone remember Verge wireless building a wifi network in NO 2 years prior, built cameras in the city (the very ones that used wifi) and brought Tropos to the city, 3 years prior to katrina? good lord, does anyone remember the efforts of MCI, Verge, US Wireless, and others during the storm. Greg likes to take credit for things , and I guess a CTO does that some times........but he and his band of (friends) consultants are far from the ones bringing new technology to the city..what they are good at is stealing other technology ideas from companies and attempting to profit from them on their own.
Interesting how all the bad press lately is finally coming out. We all agree about the technology and used wifi during the storm, some to lightup shelters, others for police, and a few for public. But Greg was far from being the driving factor behind all this...just speak to Intel and other companies in the mix....ask them at what point did they actually hear from Greg Mefferet....The bad part of this all is that it puts yet another black eye on a city that surely doesnt need it at this time. There are a lot of good CTO's and cities attempting to bring wifi and technology to the city, and Greg is a smart individual, the problem is he surrounded himself with people who are not very nice. I will leave it at that.
Posted by: wifiguy at September 23, 2006 03:24 PM
Jeez Katrina, you sound like that sorry person who was supposed to be awarded $1M of that grant work. Oh, and wait, didn't you write the grant application and pick yourself as a "sole source" vendor for the grant. Grant?
Posted by: Grant Holcomb at July 17, 2006 10:44 PM
Greg Meffert thwarted a Dept of Justice grant which would have enabled interoperability communication during Katrina. He is solely responsible for NOT having communication in the city for a week and we in New Orleans hold him responsible for the deaths of our people. If he is so brilliant, then why was he not prepared with back up systems? He KNEW the storm was coming potentially. He had to break into a store??? And you give him an award. He is a scam artist and just so you know, there is no such position as Deputy Mayor in the city of New Orleans. A totally fabricated title like his story of heriocs.
Posted by: Katrina at July 12, 2006 11:58 PM