CURRENT PERSPECTIVES
SILICON VALLEY DISPATCHES: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN OUR COMMUNICATION NETWORKS GO HAYWIRED? By David Witkowski [Editor’s Note: We welcome David Witkowski as a new columnist who will offer his perspectives on the current state of play in the wireless industry. We look forward to his many insights that will appear in the upcoming issues of the Proceedings.]
significant wireless communications to disrupt, certainly not wireless as we think of it today. Data networking was limited (at best) to 9,600 bits-per-second connections over dial-up modems. In 1989, the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) was the technology for voice, and the only thing carried on coaxial cables were local television stations and some paid channels.
In late 2015, the U.S. Geological Survey asked me to be co-author of a chapter in their next earthquake scenario, named HayWired, because it combines a hypothetical major earthquake on the Hayward Fault (in the San Francisco Bay Area) with an analysis of potential impacts to the Silicon Valley’s communication and data networking systems. The work was coordinated through Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a non-profit think tank where I serve as executive director of their Civic Technologies Initiative, which includes oversight of their wireless, wired broadband, and smart cities work. (I dislike the term “smart cities”, but that is a topic for a future column.)
Dissolve, as they say in Hollywood, to present day. Our lives are hyper-connected, and companies with the highest stock market capitalizations are internet-focused companies that provide the connections and connected services we’ve come to depend on. The Dot Com boom of the late 1990s was enabled by dial-up modems, ISDN, and Fractional T-1 circuits. The current market boom is enabled by 4G LTE and Wi-Fi. The epicenter of this economic boom is Silicon Valley, located a scant 25 miles away from the epicenter of the 1989 earthquake, and only 25 miles away from another (and potentially
Having previously worked on disaster impact analysis and table-topping in the past — notably the Disaster Preparedness Initiative at JVSV in 2007, which later became the Disaster Management Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University’s Silicon Valley campus — the disaster scenario outlined by the USGS for HayWired intrigued me. The last time the San Francisco Bay Area experienced a major disaster was the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, sometimes called the “World Series earthquake” because it happened just as the third game of that series was starting. I was 100 miles away from the epicenter on that day, yet even at that distance the shaking was so violent it set off car alarms. We lost power, and long-distance phone circuits were jammed up, but most communications remained intact — because the 1989 earthquake was pre-Internet and there were not USGS – Hayward Scenario Shakemap. (Courtesy USGS)
FALL 2021 PROCEEDINGS 31
www.radioclubofamerica.org
