Hurricane Watch -- in California.
Sep. 16th, 2003 05:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tugrikMy company makes GPS chips for cell phones and the services to support their use. These enable the cell phone companies to provide E911 (Enhanced 911) services to their customers. Nifty things come of this like the ability for rescuers to find you in a building or off the side of the road in a ditch with much higher accuracy.
These systems have been in full roll-out with a handful of US carriers for a few months now. They've had a little traffic but not a lot. The hurricane currently pounding our east coast will (unfortunately for folks living there) generate a lot of E911 traffic. More than one carrier is a little worried about this bieng our first real-world "high load test". We've done far past that in the lab without a problem so we're not too worried... but still, we've been asked to keep our 'core personnel' available 24/7 during this weather event just in case. If our systems go down for any reason we have hot and cold standby gear ready to deploy to shore it up.
My boss just told me that, yup, I'm core personnel. At least I didn't have any plans to go anywhere this week. Here's to hoping that the fewest folks possible get hurt during this bad weather -- and those that do, may help find you as quick as possible. I'm proud to be part of a company that will help speed that help up.
These systems have been in full roll-out with a handful of US carriers for a few months now. They've had a little traffic but not a lot. The hurricane currently pounding our east coast will (unfortunately for folks living there) generate a lot of E911 traffic. More than one carrier is a little worried about this bieng our first real-world "high load test". We've done far past that in the lab without a problem so we're not too worried... but still, we've been asked to keep our 'core personnel' available 24/7 during this weather event just in case. If our systems go down for any reason we have hot and cold standby gear ready to deploy to shore it up.
My boss just told me that, yup, I'm core personnel. At least I didn't have any plans to go anywhere this week. Here's to hoping that the fewest folks possible get hurt during this bad weather -- and those that do, may help find you as quick as possible. I'm proud to be part of a company that will help speed that help up.
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no subject
Date: 2003-09-16 07:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-17 12:39 am (UTC)I'm the first one to admit that tracking technologies can (and most likely will) be highly abused by government and corporations for major abuses of privacy.
However, these devices are federally mandated by 2004 for E911. Unless you keep your pre-2004 hardware you won't be able to avoid some form of positioning technology, period.
Therefore, not being able to stop it, I'm looking for the good parts of the technology. I'm also working for a company that's being as ethical as possible about things and doing what they can to meet the federal requirements without promoting privacy-breach usage.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-16 09:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-17 12:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-17 07:52 am (UTC)