The Cisco NERV
This morning I got a chance to see Cisco's NERV. This is a vehicle that they are marketing to serve as an emergency response center, not only to public service agencies, but also to corporations. The vehicle has some similarities to the traditional emergency response vehicle in many jurisdictions, but Cisco's IP focus brings some pretty cool capabilities, which of course they showed off.
Cisco keeps two of these vehicles available to be used in case of an emergency, but they are also able to provide the capability as a service. That is, they will build a vehicle, work with local agencies to keep it abreast of needs, provide a team to work with the vehicle, etc. All of the technologies on the vehicle are also available a la carte.
The vehicle was very heavy in video, providing a mixture of both analog and digital feeds, as well as local and over the air feeds, to a multi screen console. Any of the feeds can be digitized and sent over the Internet to, for example, an EOC. The Internet connection was a 3 Mb satellite connection provided by a 1.8m dish. They indicated that bandwidth was simply a matter of how much you wanted to pay. They also indicated that the impact of weather was a function of dish size. A 1.2m dish, they said, was quite susceptible to heavy overcast, while a dish much larger than theirs would be problematic in a windy situation.
They had the typical lashup between various radio services, similar to the Codespear system, but with a twist. The radios were connected by analog, permitting easy interface to a large number of radios. They had a very impressive stack of HF, VHF and UHF radios on board, and also had quickly lashed up a connection to the radio system of the corporation on whose grounds the demo was held. However, the audio was digitized, and with Cisco's VOIP focus, could also be integrated with cellular and terrestrial phone, as well as Internet based VIOP. In essence, this means that a task force could form a talk group with disparate radios, but someone with a phone or even an Internet-connected laptop could join in the talk group.
Emergency command centers always include some sort of conference area, and this was no different. However, they had high definition video conferencing. I thought the hi-def thing might be a bit of overkill, but they did indicate that can be useful in some medical emergency situations, which I suppose I could accept. But still, the hi-def part seems a bit of an extravagant use of the limited bandwidth available. Nevertheless, they had an assistant in Raleigh on the other end of the link, and it was good to see a much more natural picture than the typical, blurry, jerky-motion video conferencing.
All in all, a very impressive capability. This could certainly be a valuable tool at an incident scene, but I suspect that the cost is not insignificant.