Obama’s cell calls will always go through
When Barack Obama becomes President on Tuesday, his cellular telephone calls will be guaranteed to always get through.
The magic government ingredient that provides this guarantee is known as the National Communications System (NCS) and it has been doing it since 1963, when President John F. Kennedy created the agency to insure communications during the Cold War. In the years since, it has been expanded to include high-priority governmental Internet and cellular telephone calls as well, according to a CNET story.
Robert Kenny, director of media relations for the Federal Communications Commission’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, said in an interview this week that NCS’ priority-call system, which is now housed in the department of Homeland Security, is “for emergencies and other times there’s a need to get calls out.” Kenny went on to say that “We found that this program was very helpful during September 11. We think it’s necessary across the board at all levels of government.”
The agency operates a number of systems to insure that priority calls, soon to include those of new President Obama, get to their destinations. One, Government Emergency Telecommunications Service (TEDS), allows federal officials to make prioritized phone calls free from any public telephone, through the use of a special credit card. Most of the NCS services are considerably more sophisticated and some are even satellite-based.
Mobile phone calls for high-priority users were added to the NCS system in 2001. That program is named Wireless Priority Service (WPS), and gives authorized users (including what NCS calls “senior members of the presidential administration”) a higher-priority connection to the nearest cell tower. WPS is accessed by dialing a special prefix before the destination phone number. It will only work, however, if your individual phone has been authorized for use with the system.
There are five priority levels in use by the NCS system, from law enforcement at the bottom to “National Command Authority support for military command and control critical to national survival support for the conduct of diplomatic negotiations critical to arresting or limiting hostilities” at the top. It is to this latter group that Barack Obama will belong. So once the inauguration is complete, you may be assured that one person having no difficulties with an overstressed D.C. cell phone system will be President Barack Obama.
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January 18th, 2009
Not sure where you get TEDS from. Its GETS.
January 18th, 2009
Oh yeah, WPS works good too. I’ve actually used it In exercises and seen other cell callers get dropped in order for WPS calls to go through.