Ricochet helping Denver with Mile High ‘disaster’

On any given Sunday, Mile High Stadium has been the site of a disaster--at least for visiting NFL teams that traditionally to the Broncos there. Tomorrow, the old stadium will again host a disaster--but this time it will have nothing to do with football and everything to do with communications.

Denver is blowing up the stadium and using the demolition as a simulation for emergency personnel response. Concurrently, Denver will fire up its Ricochet wireless system, now under the auspices of Aerie Networks, and test the capabilities of that system in an emergency situation.

“The fire department is going to use it doing simulated emergencies as the rubble comes down with volunteer victims. EMTs will use it to download information about hospital availability and medical records,” said Emilie Kelly, Aerie’s marketing vice president.

Perhaps even more importantly, the police department and the Denver Office of Information Technology will use it as part of a new infrastructure to meet homeland security demands.

Ricochet will be there “as a value-added service,” determining if the system that was abandoned by Metricom still has the right stuff, Kelly said.

“It’s the first test we’ve done since we bought the assets 14 months ago,” said Kelly.

When Metricom abandoned all its Ricochet pole-top technology in its bankruptcy move, the pole owners took possession. In some instances, Kelly said, Aerie has removed that technology. In Denver, the company set up a new network operations center [NOC] and is working with the existing gear.

“We’re attempting to make sure all the different servers are talking to each other and when the traffic is terminated on a network interface facility it’s being properly authenticated and routing out to the Internet,” Kelly said.

If successful, it will be a huge step in the direction of bringing Ricochet back to life, she said.

“We really hope to have it back in commercial operation in May or June in San Diego, then moving into San Francisco, L.A. and Denver,” she said. “It’s a very important test for us to make sure that we will be ready and we can do that.”