While the White House and Congress squared-off last month on how best to solve the problems facing first responder communications, a team of IT experts at McLean, Va.-based MorganFranklin unveiled a new mobile communications vehicle that is already helping a major component of the Department of Homeland Security operate in places where IT infrastructure either does not reach or does not exist.
In an exclusive tour of the new Mobile Communications Vehicle, designed to custom specifications for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), the team at MorganFranklin showed Breaking Gov how they have integrated a wide variety of IT and communications systems to effectively expand the agency’s enterprise network to any geographic location in which it needs to operate – even those where there is little or no infrastructure in place.
Robert Franklin, Managing Director of National Security Programs at MorganFranklin, said the typical use of the vehicles is to setup a communications “bubble” in areas where there is little or no connectivity. The vehicle’s reach-back capabilities extend the agency’s IT applications to remote sites, providing interoperable video, voice and data to teams in the field.
The vehicle has high-bandwidth pipes back to [an agency’s] home base, where it can reach applications and provide command and control.” — Robert Franklin.
These specific vehicles will help support a variety of ICE field operations, including satellite imagery of the border, voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP), and on-the-go connectivity with the ICE headquarters network that transforms the vehicle into a virtual command center. Similar vehicles have been built for other component agencies within DHS, the Department of Defense, as well as the Chicago Fire Department. “The vehicle has high-bandwidth pipes back to [an agency’s] home base, where it can reach applications and provide command and control,” said Franklin
“The biggest capability and the most important one is the transport layer,” said Rob Blake, Managing Director of Technology at MorganFranklin. “The primary means of transport for this vehicle is a Ku-band satellite system, which provides a broadband mechanism for transporting video, voice and data.”
In addition, the vehicle leverages a broadband cellular system as a backup to the main satellite link. Perhaps most important is an interoperability gateway switch, which enables cross-band communications between a multitude of federal, state and local agencies, all of which may be responding to the same crisis.
Franklin said the overall themes he sees in agency requirements for mobile communications are flexibility and interoperability. And while a lot of agencies tend to migrate toward new, emerging technologies, MorganFranklin first looks at the agency’s specific requirements before choosing specific technologies to integrate into the vehicles.
The company has built larger vehicle platforms with expanded capabilities for city and state agencies that need to reconstitute large swaths of radio and cellular infrastructure that might be damaged during a disaster, said Blake. In Chicago, for example, the fire department uses the vehicles to reconstitute cellular 911 services – a capability that was destroyed and did not function during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
During any such major disaster where the cellular switches are destroyed, it will take hours or even days for the commercial carriers to deploy their mobile capabilities. “But the first responders need to get those 911 calls,” said Blake. “So you put the dispatchers on site [in the vehicle] and you engineer the cell switch so that anybody that makes any call goes directly to 911.”
Franklin said the ability to have a phone talk to land mobile radio or a cellular device and communicate to anyone in the world is what agencies are asking for. “And to do that we develop and integrate an ‘everything over IP’ architecture,” he said. “That basically brings any sort of communication device to an IP packet that can be connected to anywhere in the world.”