One of the software systems I have designed and written is often used in disaster recovery. It has been used for hurricanes, the New York blackout and September 11th. My office in New Jersey has photographs and newspaper clippings of some of those deployments. One of the photographs is especially cool. It shows a tall contraption of crane arm, ladder and cell antennas looking out over the Hudson River. That on the spot ingenuity helped plug the communications hole.

Lou is a great bloke and tough as fencing wire. On September 11th he and another fellow were driving to New York with a generator in tow. The other bloke mentioned how he didn't want to go into New York as he feared for his life. Lou promptly jammed on the brakes, reached across the bloke and opened the passenger side door. His comment was, "Get the f*** out.". That fellow was left on the side of the highway and had to walk home. That is Lou.

The World Trade Center towers are full of communications equipment, live antennas, cell antennas, microwave hops etc. When the towers came down New York was faced with a big communications hole.

Microwaves are a good example of a capital intensive technology. They require engineering to ensure they don't interfere with other receivers. They also demand precise alignment. Cell antennas on the other hand are far more forgiving when mounted and less directional.

So Lou and his techs found themselves with the problem of setting up some structure to enable cell communications between New York and New Jersey. They drove their trucks to Jersey City, near the Statue of Liberty, and commandeered a crane for their purposes. Lou rigged his ladder perpendicularly across it and mounted cell antennas off it.

It worked.

The office I work from in New Jersey used to be a small conference room. One of the advantages of it being it has a large whiteboard in it. The photos are left over from when it served that function. One day myself and Lou were puzzling over how to solve a customer request, me from the software side, and Lou from the operational side.

We were kind of stuck and scratching our heads when a huge grin came across Lou's face.

"See that photo?" he said.

"Yeh. What is that for?" I replied, and he told me the story behind it.

Due to his ingenuity and the decentralised nature of the technology involved he helped to plug one of the biggest communications holes the United States had seen - and the great thing, he did it with a crane, a ladder and a couple of antennas.

Even MacGyver is not that good.

This is the advantage of decentralised technologies. They enable the routing around of damage very quickly. The microwave hops in comparison were down for ages. Decentralised technologies fair better against terrorist attacks and systems disruption.