Industry Interview: CoCo Communications
CGF 2011 Volume: 3 Issue: 4 (September)
Q: Can you please provide some background on CoCo Communications and the company’s work with the U.S. Coast Guard?
A: Boarding teams play a critical role in port security, harbor defense and coastal-warfare operations. A boarding party needs to rapidly set up mobile mesh networks that permit them to search for dangerous and illegal materials, such as radioactive materials, drugs, or explosives, while maintaining communications with headquarters and collaborating with remotely located experts.
The CoCo Boarding Team Solution for the Coast Guard, BT Comms, is a wireless ad-hoc mesh network solution that eliminates traditional below-decks connectivity problems. BT Comms works where UHF/ VHF radios do not and overcome the problems associated with conventional radio frequency voice repeaters. Our solution has been tested at the 2006 and 2007 Joint Interoperability Test Command’s [JITC] DoD Interoperability Communications Exercise [DICE].
Q: How do your communications allow for interoperability and convoy support?
A: CoCo’s Land Mobile Radio [LMR] interoperability solution beats the competition with a simple, flexible, secure, affordable, network-based approach. Rather than requiring participating agencies to build and support a center of interoperable communications, the CoCo approach is completely decentralized. This keeps costs down while leveraging all of your existing assets, such as Internet connectivity, routers and LMR assets. It offers a uniquely low total cost of ownership and real-time dynamic connectivity that responds to the problems you face today instead of the ones you planned for last year.
Radio interoperability allows communication across radio networks without expensive upgrades to existing equipment. Additionally, device interoperability allows communication between radios and other device types, including landlines, cell phones, laptops, PDAs and other PC-based devices—locally or across the Internet-controlled communications.
Q: What are some of the challenges that must be overcome in meeting key Coast Guard objectives?
A: Many times Coast Guard operators find themselves in situations where transmission signals are simply nonexistent. Bringing communications to the warfighter or public safety personnel who are operating at the edges of networks where there is no connectivity—and by edges of networks we’re talking about areas where there’s little or no infrastructure in place at all—is a key challenge facing Coast Guard personnel. One of the most common of these edges for Coast Guard boarding teams is down in the belly of large steel hulled vessels where the steel and other obstacles can easily swallow up communication signals and leave boarding teams in a potentially dangerous situation without the ability to talk to headquarters or their commander back on the cutter ship.
Q: What sets CoCo Communications apart from the competition?
A: CoCo’s mission is to enable secure and reliable multimedia communications in the world’s most challenging tactical network environments. CoCo engineering is different by design. We combine a coherent set of core values with an agile development methodology, enabling rapid production of stable, high-performance solutions. CoCo’s team of engineers has more than 200 years of combined software development experience and we are a 100 percent onshore U.S.-based team. CoCo’s expertise is in developing tactical networking communications solutions and our IP services serve as the basis for developing mission critical communications applications.
Q: Can you tell us a little about your time with the USCG Auxiliary and what you take away from it?
A: After 9/11, I was searching, in some small way, to help prevent the tragedy that occurred on 9/11. One of my pilot friends on the East Coast said the USCG Auxiliary was looking for qualified pilots with private aircraft to fly missions for the USCG. My friend knew how much I enjoyed being a volunteer member of the Audubon Heavy Rescue Squad for nine years in my home town and knew I proudly served as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army Reserve.
These USCG Auxiliary missions include: search and rescue, responding to pollution incidents, aerial photography, transporting USCG personal and material, and flying security patrols. I investigated the USCG AUXAIR program headquartered in Seattle and was very impressed with the USCG and USCG Auxiliary people, the AUXAIR program and its missions and applied to be a member of the USCG Auxiliary. After a rigorous background check, the successful completion of a dozen online courses, meeting USCG flight training requirements, swim test and aircraft inspection, my airplane and I were accepted into the USCG AUXAIR program.
While flying USCG patrols, I experience the need for interoperable radio communications firsthand. Most aircraft radios are VHF AM and the USCG radios are VHF FM. The two radio technologies do not interoperate. The headsets I use in the aircraft to communicate with the flight crew are hardwired into the airplane and do not interoperate with the USCG VHF FM radio. When my aircraft is out of range of the USCG VHF FM stations, the USCG communications center at Sector Puget Sound located in Seattle will call my cell phone to obtain a mission progress report. These reports must be made every 15 minutes. Frequently my flight crew must maintain continuous contact with a USCG surface vessel, air traffic control, Sector Puget Sound and a USCG air station operational command and must also monitor the VHF AM radio for local uncontrolled air traffic over the Puget Sound. Did I mention that I also have to safely fly the airplane and complete the assigned USCG mission? I really appreciate the interoperable radio solution that CoCo offers its customers. ♦