When Typhoon Odette (Rai, outside Philippines) made landfall in the Visayas, it disrupted a lot of basic infrastructure. There was no water, no power and even more importantly, no cellphone service. So consequently, no mobile internet as well.
And this hampered any recovery efforts. Disaster recovery teams could not coordinate; valuable time was lost.
So, what can we do about this?
We start with the Hongkong protesters and marvel at how they were able to coordinate their actions without their traffic passing through Telcos. You see, the protesters feared widespread spying, so they used a mobile chat app from Open Garden called FireChat. It works EVEN WITHOUT Telco connections.
Firechat uses your phone’s bluetooth and wifi to bounce (or relay) chats to get the message to the intended recipient. The practical distance is around 200m between two devices. But the coverage can go much farther as more users deploy it. The message is then bounced off from one user to another until it gets to the final recipient.
As to privacy, don’t worry. The message is encrypted so only the sender and the recipient of the message can read it. The only problem? FireChat has since been discontinued. So we are now on the hunt for alternatives. One such alternative is Briar. https://briarproject.org/ (Thanks to J Angelo Racoma and Rene Canlas for the tip)
How does Briar work? It is similar to FireChat. And in my opinion a bit better. It can do a store and forward (see person C) that ‘delivers’ the message to final destination when they travel to another area.
The beauty of Briar is that once Person C reaches the cluster with Person E in it, the message can then be sent out via internet. So if even only a fraction of Cebu’s resident had Briar (or similar app) deployed, residents could have used their mobile phones to pass important messages to each other. This despite telco services being down and out.
They can use it to alert LGUs of where help is needed. Disaster recovery teams can respond swifter and be more targeted. Families can keep themselves updated as to each others’ status… and not have to worry.
While it was too late for Cebu to install decentralized chat apps, let us learn from this. Now is the best time to deploy these apps in OUR community BEFORE any disaster strikes.
Why not coordinate with your LGUs or local Disaster Recovery Teams about this? (DRMMC). Talk to them about a ‘Shadow Comms” systems that YOUR community can setup. Note: We are currently working with Pangasinan’s UPICT council to test out such a system.
Please share your experience and let us know how if it helps.