Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Japanese CyberCafe


In anticipation of the Regional Incident Management Team (RIMT) exercise this week, demonstration of Groove and other tools to Ruapehu District Council, and the EM Conference next week, we've had the mobile office all set up and tested, downloaded all those updates that seem to arrive between activities and reminded ourselves how things work. Comments were made about it looking like a Japanese cybercafe!

The RIMT exercise is based at Landguard Bluff in Wanganui on Thursday and Friday and will involve 40-50 staff mostly from across the region. The team will be running through their response to large scale rural fires.

The Ruapehu District Council will be looking at the use of Groove in their EOC and figuring out just what they need to do to get on the Group-wide system.

The conference presentation is on Technology in Action and will be a song and dance routine between Rosco, Evan and me.

Finally, the Inmarsat BGAN hardware will be here on Thursday with expected service available from March. This means we can keep communicating when all the phones (landline and cellular) are down.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

This is good idea to have a cybercafe but why to wait until March, since their is a new service by this company from the middle east called Thuraya and they claims they have launched their new satellite over fare east, I belive Japan is coveraged. Recently they annouced they have a 444kb/s ThurayaIP broadband device.

Shane Bayley said...

Wow... a real comment. Thanks for the feedback. The reasons I've opted for the BGAN via INMARSAT are... nice small field unit that is easy to set up, NZ Fire Service and the Ministry of Civil Defence & Emergency Management have already purchased several units, the UNDAC team and the APHP and IHP use this network etc etc. At the moment we have access to the IPStar network so nothing is on hold.

The cybercafe is really a cyberoffice for the team. I do know that Telecoms Sans Frontieres will probably come in to set up a cybercafe for international responders.

Thanks for you feedback - I will be taking a further look at your suggestion.

Shane