A live exercise took place at the port of Long Beach, Calif., on Wednesday, April 19. With more than 300 local and federal officials responding, it was one of the largest homeland security training exercises ever conducted. The purpose of the exercise was to review emergency operations and communications plans and evaluate emergency service organizations capabilities to respond to a simulated terrorist attack. Some of the participating agencies in the exercise included the Long Beach Police, Fire, Public Works and Technology Services Departments; FAA; Federal Bureau of Investigation; National Transportation Safety Board; Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and EMS; U.S. Army, Ninth Civil Support Team; and the American Red Cross.

Ordinarily, coordinating multiple agencies at the scene of a major incident is difficult because agencies rely on proprietary voice communications systems that often do not interoperate with other agencies' communications systems. The organizers deployed PacketHop's Aware communication suite, an integrated suite of mobile mesh-enabled multimedia communications software. It enabled secure peer-to-peer wireless broadband communications, known as mobile mesh, via software loaded onto standards-based mobile devices. Its server-less applications, which include real-time multicast video, GPS-enabled resource location tracking, whiteboarding and multimedia instant messaging, provided users with an effective means to communicate.

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