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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Ecclesine who wrote (11169)	9/1/2005 4:52:12 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

Thanks, Peter. The last couple of paragraphs in your message #11169 are telling in several ways, not the least being that, high frequency radio can still do many things that you can't do with cellular or pcs, basically due to reasons having to do with geographic reach. Granted, it's not normally assumed that absolute and total devastation like we're seeing along the Gold Coast would ever occur or last for a sustained period of time, as we now know will be the case there. I get the point that Ham operators were central to that piece, and that point was made to emphasize the severity of the situation there. But another point that could also may be made is that, high freq still has a place in special situations, such as Disaster Recovery and institutional business continuation under dire conditions such as we have now. The larger problem at hand is daunting, however, if you care to view it on a national scale terms of risk management and the level of preparedness/insurance one is willing to pay. After all, the thing about using information that is gathered through risk assessment exercises is that sooner or later someone has to step up to the plate and say, "I'm willing to pay X dollars in order be prepared to save Y percentage of my ongoing enterprise." When a general fund is used, it's left to politics to decide who is covered by how much. Alternatively, when principals are asked directly how much "they" would pay for "their own" protection against physical threats, you find that they're often willing to put up a lot less in the way of insurance against disaster preparedness than they would accept from the general fund. I've seen this time and again between different sections of trading floors within the same brokerage firm, where the director of Foreign Exchange operations, for example, deems only 20% of its IT assets as critical enough to warrant protection through the rental of off-site backup facilities, while the Equitie Desk managers, OTOH, may demand to protect on the order of 40% or more, because more real revenue dollars in the way of commissions and fees, as measured in terms of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per day, per unit of time, and per unit of IT infrastructure, are at risk. Getting back on topic, the power issue is the real killer here. Even if subterranean controlled enviornmental vaults (CEVs) were exploited more than they are today for housing communications switching and toll functions, there would still be the matter of fumes exhaust from generators that would be difficult to deal with during flooding, and the need to fuel up every so many days that would soon become impossible during extended time frames. I've yet to come across any meaningful reports concerning the condition of the BellSouth or other telco/MSO/IXC COs in the area, other than to state that they're all out. Have you? Anyone? ------ FAC