Podcast: Cliff Saran interviews TSF staffers
>>
It began as a simple idea. In the early 1990s
Jean-François Cazenave, founding president ofTélécoms
Sans Frontières (TSF), saw that people
displaced by humanitarian crises desperately wanted to speak to
their loved ones to let them know their circumstances.
"In every refugee camp we visited, people who had lost
everything would come in with a telephone number and plead with us
to inform their relatives that they were okay," he says.
Emergency telecom services were set up during the break-up of
Yugoslavia in the 1990s and in Kurdistan during the first Gulf War.
But TSF's first official mission was on the border between Albania
and Kosovo in 1998, when the organisation was furnished with its
first satellite phone. It also worked in Iraq between April and
October 2003, providing comms services to humanitarian agencies and
civilians.
TSF soon found that the international response teams that deploy
in emergencies also have a critical need for reliable telecoms in
the first days of a crisis. So it expanded its operations, improved
its technology, and began to establish rapidly deployable emergency
telecoms centres to serve UN, government and charity workers.
It quickly gained a reputation for being one of the first to
arrive on the scene of a disaster. Usually, it sets up a
communications centre, with phones, fax machines, internet, e-mail
and laptop connectivity to let humanitarian workers
communicate.
A scrap of paper
Conflicts and emergencies often displace civilians and separate
families on a massive scale. The affected populations are often
left with a destroyed comms infrastructure. Often, people abandon
their homes with just a phone number scribbled on a scrap of paper
hidden in their shoes.
"For displaced people, a phone number can be more important than
food or medicines," says Cazenave. "People just want to tell a
relative, 'We are okay, we are in this refugee camp, the children
are okay, but uncle is dead.'
"Everywhere in the world people have a telephone number for
someone they know."
TSF was set up in 1998 to answer this basic need for
communications. During the Kosovo war (1996-1999), TSF gave
refugees the chance to make telephone calls. Cazenave recalls,
"People went to our telecoms centre to make telephone calls. They
did not want food or water."
Cazenave describes the services TSF offers as a humanity
operation. It enables displaced peope to make a three-minute
telephone call for free. "On every TSF mission we have offered a
three-minute call to any affected family," he says.
In place in 24 hours
Cazenave's aim is to deploy TSF on the ground within 24 hours of
being alerted to a humanitarian crisis. Alerts come in from various
sources including news websites and the
Global Disaster Alert
Coordination System (GDAC), which provides SMS alerts and
web-based assessment of an affected region based on the
vulnerability of the population. A traffic-light system is used to
signal the probability for a catastrophic situation with needs for
international humanitarian intervention.
TSF then monitors the situation and assesses whether emergency
communications will be required because the telecoms
infrastructrure in the affected area has been damaged.
Once the team has arrived, the equipment is up and running
within 20 minutes. The TSF crew installs
Inmarsat
broadband global area network (BGAN) satellite communications
kit. These laptop-like devices are highly portable and easy to set
up, which is especially important during the first days of an
emergency. But bandwidth is expensive, so TSF only uses them for
phone, e-mail and basic internet access.
First on the scene
Being one of the first on the scene can be useful, says
Cazenave, especially if TSF is able to report back on the
situation.
"When we were in Indonesia we were sent to do an assessment
before aid was deployed. You can't just send food to a village if
there are wounded people. How can you report that the village needs
medical assistance?" Communications is key. "This is the reason our
crews are indispensable," he says.
With regional offices in France, Thailand and Nicaragua,
TSF has supported relief efforts around the world, including
Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Niger and Chad, and has provided
emergency comms in Europe during heavy flooding. TSF teams were
deployed in the wake of the Indian earthquake in Bhuj in 2001, the
Peru earthquake in 2001, flooding in Venezuela in 2002, the Boxing
Day tsunami in 2005, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the earthquake
in Thailand in 2006, among others.
TSF missions are run mainly by volunteers taking time out from
university. The volunteers work for around a year on TSF projects.
There are also a small number of full-time staff.
"All missions are different," says TSF staff member Benoit
Chabrier. "In Lebanon, the GSM networks were down, so we set up a
satellite communications link so people could call their families,
This provides a kind of psychological help they can ask for help,
money, clothes, official papers, anything."
University volunteers
TSF volunteers are usually network and telecoms undergraduates,
because they can offer the most up-to-date skills. In the field,
volunteers are not only expected to set up the emergency
communications links, but also act as the PC support desk to help
humanitarian workers get their computers up and running.
Mathieu Frappier, has just finished an 18-month stint at TSF as
a volunteer and is studying for a part-time degree in telecoms. He
was deployed in April to the Solomon Islands to support the tsunami
relief effort, and also during the Mexican fires in September
2007.
Frappier says there is a real sense of a student campus-like
atmosphere at TSF head office, which is located in a former dental
clinic in the city of Pau, south west France. "There are a lot of
students here at TSF. It's like a big family."
Like the majority of volunteers, Frappier is in his twenties. He
is planning to come to the UK this summer to study English, and
wants to work with the UN as a specialist in networking and
telecoms.
People seem to work long hours, even between missions says
Fabien Doleac, a telecoms graduate, who has been at TSF for about a
year. Doleac spent time in Nicaragua setting up a communications
centre for humanitarian workers. "You can't simply just stop
working. We have to keep TSF running," he says.
No power
The numerous challenges in providing telephone services for
refugees and a communications centre for humanitarian workers
include the disaster zone lacking electrical power for the
satellite equipment. But the TSF crew come prepared. They charge
batteries from the car they drive into the affected area. The car
battery can also be connected to a power inverter, which provides
mains electricity for the equipment. If the team is lucky, they may
be able to find a working generator, but since the car and the
generator require fuel, TSF has to establish a permanent
electricity supply quickly. Even so, its equipment will run for two
days without a fixed supply.
The crew may be unable to determine the location of the
communications centre satellite in advance. Satellite equipment
needs to be oriented in such a way that the dish has unobstructed
line of sight with the satellite. "You can't have the
communications centre located in the east if the satellite faces
west," TSF staff member Oisin Walton points out. Trees may also
obscure the office, so the positioning of the satellite dish can
only be determined once the crew arrive on site.
But even after power, location and other technical challenges
have been overcome, the real work for the TSF crew only begins once
communications are up and running. For instance, the team also has
to handle wrong phone numbers. Sometimes people come into the camp
and they do not have the country code for the person they want to
call or the number is wrong. Walton says it is very difficult but
the team can often make an educated guess.
TSF can find missing digits from a phone number by looking up
region codes in a phone directory, but Walton says it is not always
possible to find a number. "In Mozambique, older people did not
have phone numbers. They only gave us addresses." The problem for
TSF is that there is no worldwide directory services available over
the internet, which makes it hard to track down a phone number just
from the postal address.
Clogged up by incoming calls
And sometimes the people being called are simply unavailable or
the phone is engaged and refugees have to leave a voicemail, which
leads to more problems as TSF volunteers may only be in a camp for
one day before moving the communications centre to another
site.
Incoming call volume can also disrupt TSF's efforts. People
expect to be able to make a call but incoming calls block the line.
"When we were in Kosovo in 1999 we received 1,200 calls a day,"
recalls Cazenave. "Inmarsat said we had saturated its
satellite."
And when TSF moved to Turkey in 1999 to support the earthquake
relief effort there, it was still receiving calls from people
calling from England trying to contact Kosovo.
Luckily, people soon discover from their phone bills that
calling a satellite phone is expensive, so incoming calls soon
become more manageable.
VGAN upsizing
Once basic comms have been established in the communications
centre, TSF sets up a system that can handle larger volumes of
calls and internet bandwidth. This requires VGAN satellite
equipment, a large piece of kit that requires a licence to operate.
It normally takes around three weeks before VGAN can be deployed in
an affected area.
TSF will set up a VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) once the
relief co-ordination centre is up and running. The equipment is
used by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), UN agencies like the
World Food Program,
the World Health Organization,
the United Nations Development
Programme, local authorities, health and education departments
and sometimes the military. Cazenave sees VSAT as part of the
long-term recovery plan for an affected region. The equipment is
often left behind when TSF leaves.
TSF has several corporate sponsors including Inmarsat, Eutelsat,
Vzada, AT&T and Cable & Wireless. Between them, they
provide TSF with mobile and satellite telecoms facilities. Nissan
has also provided a four-wheel drive vehicle.
In October 2006 the
United Nations
Foundation and the
Vodafone
Group Foundation, announced they would give TSF $2m over five
years. Their support has enabled TSF to maintain regional
operations that support round-the-clock disaster monitoring, and
staff - including volunteers that have been recruited and trained
in-region - who can be deployed within 48 hours anywhere in the
world that disaster strikes. The funding also allows TSF teams to
co-ordinate relief efforts with the
UN Children's Fund (Unicef)
and the UN Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Cazenave hopes TSF will receive more funding. "Over the next 12
months we'll continue to respond to emergencies." He says he is
often asked how come TSF needs to operate continuously. Are there
really so many disasters that it need to keep running full-time?
Cazenave thinks so. "We have been deployed 350 days a year," he
says.
Money before material
With the support of six satellite and telecoms operators,
Cazenave's priority is not getting more equipment, but more money.
"I'd like to appeal to the telecommunications industry to support
our humanitarian work, in the same way the pharmaceutical industry
supports relief efforts," he says.
Funding will not only support more relief efforts but allow TSF
to buy more airtime from the satellite and mobile operators that
fund TSF. That may seem an odd need given the corporate support
from the telco sector, but Cazenave says it allows TSF to buy
airtime at a preferential rate. And given he already has telecoms
support, Cazenave would like funding for laptops and software from
IT suppliers.
Podcast: Cliff Saran interviews TSF staffers >>
Expro drills down into satellite comms market >>