Evening fellow nerds. I am looking for some options. We have a project going to work to setup E-comms across our 42 acres multiple building campus. One of our challenges is that one of our severe weather shelters is a basement that is fairly deep underground, thus two-way radios and cell phones are completely useless in that location. And the rest are fairly resistant to RF being re-enforced cinder block construction in metal buildings. Thus we have been looking at alternative means of communicating between these shelters and have a robust and redundant system. We considered our phone system but it is a WebEx system thus cloud based thus it is vulnerable to internet outages, We have considered base station radios in each shelter with external antennas but those antennas themselves are vulnerabilities. And one of my suggestions is for us to harness our own intranet infrastructure. But our issue is that we have largely removed our servers in-favor of cloud based services. But luckily, my department has managed to retain a single server that acts only as a relay to a single outside service. Thus we should have at the very least limited capacity left in that server to fulfill the function of a messaging server that is still capable of being powered for at least half a day during a power outage. But our IT department has asked me to give them some suggestion for some sort of IM server software that might work for this function. Who has some suggestions that I might want to add to my list?
WebEx on premise should work to make it available even when WAN is down. Issue is cost and likely the need for a Cisco box to stuff in your rack.
That is the problem they aren’t willing to add any additional servers as the organization would prefer not to have any local servers and favors cloud based solutions. Like I said our department is really the only one with a local host still on site.
Then explain to them you cant have a cloud service if they arent willing to have disruptions when internet is down, and you cant have local redundandy if they arent willing to have any local servers.
I do two-way radio and wireless data for public safety customers. What you want is a professional BDA (bi-directional amplifier) from someone like Comba. You can specify what RF bands the BDA should support so you can use it for your existing radios and cell phones if done properly. You can use multiple donor antennas for redundancy as well.
So let me add some insight into the fun and games with our IT department. About a year our cybersecurity team, at the urging of our senior leadership, disabled all USB memory devices on company computers (this was the result of user making a dumb decision). They did this without considers for the fact that many of us, especially us engineers and technicians, relied on those devices to fulfill our job duties. As a result, I have spent the last year replacing 10s thousands of dollars worth of equipment because they simply will not give me an exemption to this policy (hints my department having the last local server in the facility). And when I suggested using our internal network as a secondary or tertiary means of communication as a matter of overcoming some of our challenges, all I heard was, but we have external cloud services. I when I suggest that remote as it might be we could lose our redundant internet connections I get a deer in the headlights look. And yes planning for catastrophic failures and disaster is part of my job thus I get to come up with worst case scenario.
Our reservations about expanding our radio system is two fold. One is the $30K expense of a repeater system and the second is the physical vunerablities of antennas. Thus our leadership is heavily agaist expanding that system.