• The WebSDR is a "best-effort" service.  This letter seems to imply some sort of guarantee of service or reliability.  On the "About" page in the "Terms and Conditions" section there are explicit statements to the contrary.  The author was either unware of these statements or chose to ignore them.
• The WebSDR is not intended to be a part of critical infrastructure.  It can be inferred from the content of this letter that the Northern Utah WebSDR - and perhaps others - are considered to be a part of some sort of emergency response network.  If this is the case, it is being done without the knowledge, permission or consent of the Northern Utah WebSDR - or that of any other WebSDR system of which I am aware.  Connectivity to the Northern Utah WebSDR - being in a rural location, relies on three wireless hops to get to the fiber landing and thus there are few options for redundant connectivity - even if we weren't a volunteer, donation-supported organization.
• It is unclear what "service" they were using.  If we presume that some sort of test was being conducted and this is not just the angry rantings of someone whose net was interrupted, we don't know whether they were using the WebSDR or one of the six KiwiSDRs on site - possibly using the TDOA extension.
• It is represented that "they" support the Northern Utah WebSDR.  We have no idea who these people are and are unaware of any such activity as is described.  As such, we probably won't even miss their support - assuming that it's even true.

To Whom it may concern,

I represent a number of parties involved with HF research, Marine Communications, Emergency Communications Systems, Marine Life preservation technologies, among other high priority and potentially life critical long distance OTTH [over the horizon] and StS [Ship to Shore] systems.
It is our understanding that your company [] supports in part or wholly one of our most critical sites with various network and communications services. Please consider the following communication to be of the utmost priority and a warning.

The site of which I speak goes by the name of "The Northern Utah WebSDR" and/or "Northern Utah SDR" and/or "UtahSDR" which shall hereto be referred to as "UT SDR" for purpose of brevity within these communications.
This site is located at or around [] within Box Elder County, UT on property belonging to []. The property manager has been included in these communications to aid with efforts to be mentioned below.

 On 25 JULY at 01:16 UTC our group lost connectivity to this critical site at the worst possible moment during a tremendous international effort. At this time the collective parties were testing a new marine high frequency "EMERGENCY Location Transponder." This is a system used to locate watercraft, aircraft, and other marine bound vessels which have deviated, are lost, in distress, or otherwise impaired. Once deployed this system could save an estimated 1700 lives annually and over $27bn of lost freight and materials to the US market alone. Given this high frequency EMERGENCY location transponder can operate independent of any ship system, it has the ability to operate throughout crucial stages of an incident. We are sure you can share with us the desire to save lives and empower international emergency response organizations to quickly locate disasters. Our latest efforts have been underway for the better part of a decade in pursuit of a NEW global marine high frequency emergency response network to replace the ancient and in many cases unmonitored systems currently in place. Most of the current VHF radio systems available to general watercraft cease to work when only a few miles away from shore in open water where disasters are most imminent. When it comes to small private vessels over 95% are not equipped with any location system as modern satellite based units are prohibitively expensive and not available throughout much of the developing world. Our system would be accessible by anyone without reliance on commercial monitoring networks and would work globally without paying into the pockets of multinational signal monitoring monopolies and satellite tycoons. To facilitate this dream we have spent over three years obtaining the funds, expertise, personel, sponsors, and supporting organizations to allow a global realtime test. Unfortunately it seems a breakdown local to you impaired this test potentially to the detriment of our decades of research and years of planning.

Over the last ten years a publicly available network of remote software defined receivers [SDRs] has been built by interested parties for the purpose of monitoring global signals. The Northern Utah WebSDR is a key site for this network as it finally allows complete coverage of coastal waters around US, Canada, and Mexico. Upgrades their organization made recently introduced monitoring of the North Atlantic zone which has had little to no coverage since the conception of this project in 1995. With this coverage available we could finally get underway with scheduling the necessary permissions from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and governments of the countries involved. With much excitement we were granted an experimental operating certificate offering a five hour window beginning at 00:00 UTC and concluding at 05:00 UTC on 25 JULY. Over a hundred personnel were involved in fitting and operating multiple transponders deployed aboard over a dozen private and commercial vessels around the world for the exclusive purpose of utilizing this authorized test window. At 01:16 UTC all communication to the [UT SDR] was severed effectively causing an end to our critical testing. Despite service being restored at some point before 03:00 UTC the window of opportunity had already been lost and our efforts considered a failure. Demonstrating this system is imperative to the success and continuation of our collective life preservation projects not only monetarily but by principle. This outage eliminated support from a number of member organizations and brought great concern for others. The website and social communications of []. did not show any amount of urgency in addressing this issue further degrading confidence of myself and all involved.

It is with this precedence I implore you and your corporations to review YOUR systems and implement far more robust protocols. We also implore you to implement a more accessible and preferably automated public facing status and outage reporting system along with staff who will offer more concern to outages. As of the writing of this message no updates have been published and we have received no reply to your listed support email addresses. You must realize that even the smallest network provider holds lives in their hands at all times, and are responsible to facilitate proper handling of potentially life critical information. By agreeing to serve these remote SDR sites you become an artery providing critical information to responding organizations and to families of those affected. We understand that no system is perfect and outages do occur, but from our research and perspective it appears your outage was completely preventable with proper considerations and engineering. If you are not willing to improve redundancy or make major changes to mitigate future outages, please take the prerogative and end your contract with the Northern Utah WebSDR and any other organizations who may need emergency status. In review it was also noticed that you do not have ANY e911 documentation on your website or in your contracts which puts you out of compliance with the FCCs E911 regulations. This being noticed, we fear for not only our interests but those of your own customers throughout your community.

In conclusion,
We would hope this apparent lack of urgency is only due to poor or no training regarding the importance of the internet in emergency systems. If you do not have an understanding of these systems and the life critical importance of the internet in global emergencies, please reach out to local emergency communications organizations for training. In coming times life safety will fall into the hands of anyone involved with global communications including yourself. Your company may just be that link in the chain of communication during the next major maritime or aviation event. Your preparedness and redundancy will determine if it ends in triumph or tragedy. Please consider these points with great importance and consider the guidance we have suggested. We do not wish to escalate this further and have no plans to do so if efforts are made to correct the faults within your operations or if you offer public disclaimers offering information on your lack of emergency preparedness. With the direct effect YOUR outage had on our operations, we will no longer be supporting the [UT SDR] or any organization involved with []. Until proof is shown of redundancy and procedural improvements we cannot suggest any service or corporation with any amount of importance or urgency utilize your network services or physical locations.

With Great Concern
Franchesco
Global Emergency Communications Director, ELT Specialist
Boating Industry Coalition
Retired emergency communications response lead
AT&T Global Emergency Operations


Reply to an email sent by our ISP:

Dear Sir,

I am honored to have roused the interest of the chief engineer! What a response indeed, and an appreciated one at that.

Regarding your earlier direct reply and wishes to keep this private, I feel it is imperative for all parties involved to remain attached to this thread however I do recognize that the many laterals within your organization may be a bit much. At your wishes I have minimized the scope of my CC to involve only those who seem to be in ownership of [] as well as the communications officers I see relevant to this conversation. When emails are minimized to one point of contact their importance is quickly lost. With that out of the way allow me to address your replies one subject at a time.

Contractual internet services:
 "There is no standing contractual agreement for any service to the WebSDR or any of our standard sites. This is covered in our terms of service outlining that we provide service at reasonable effort"
Indeed I see that portion of your documentation, however, I may suggest you revise that document to be much more clear and concise for the common man to understand.

Use of the SDR for HA ventures:
 "As seen under "Terms and Conditions" on http://www.sdrutah.org/info/about.html"
This is yet another resource you have made me aware of, for that I am grateful. But, as per the language of the page we never intended to use the UT SDR as the primary resource for life and safety, but instead will rely on a vast network of such devices and sites to avoid life threatening downtime. We also understand the UT SDR organization itself is a volunteer organization who cannot offer any guarantees, but this does not speak to the interconnections facilitating internet access which are your responsibility. You seem to forget that while they, the UT SDR, are a small nonprofit organization; you are a corporation who has an incomparable deal of responsibility. Our issue being the backend infrastructure to process the whole network of receiver sites cannot be afforded or acquired until a scale demonstration proved our efforts feasible. As stated in my last email, we were relying on your infrastructure to facilitate our approval during this trial period. Alas your lack of connectivity compromised these efforts causing great tension among our organizations and a great deal of loss.

Scope of this email:
"Why must you effectively spam email our entire organization and bring in unrelated outside contacts"
As per the definition of a spam email, I would hardly say this went to a large number of recipients and is most definitely relevant. The inclusion of outside sources merely makes aware local and regional groups the frailty of the internet service. I can assure you this has always had a positive result and is of no concern. As far as its effectiveness, well the issue is being looked into now which answers to its own.

Contacting the UTAHSDR directly:
Again as mentioned above, this issue is not regarding the UT SDR organization. The failure was not with their systems but rather with yours, so why would we not contact the source?

Lack of urgency:
"Despite being a small company we do make reasonable efforts to restore service in a timely manner"
You have missed the point entirely!
If the systems are engineered properly you should not need to make any effort to restore services as they will not be down. Hundreds of thousands of towers and communications structures are hit by lightning yet they continue to operate. Please take this as a learning opportunity to get some professional consulting in the field. Whoever you dispatched to resolve the issue had obviously identified the affected subsystems nearly an hour before service was restored. It may be overly speculative, but I hope you take some time to better train your technical staff.

Who are we?:
I represent a number of organizations who are designing systems to poll data from publicly available receiver systems to offer an API which can be used to triangulate vessels and downed aircraft equipped with independent high frequency emergency locator transponders. Another organization I oversee has designed affordable and compact transponders capable of being built and deployed by the most basic of owner/operators and their crews. In essence we are offering an aggregation system that all emergency response and recovery organizations can gain access to with humanly readable data that does not rely on the antiquated or over complicated systems in use today. The Boating Industry Coalition is simply a publishing front where these ideas can be portrayed and eventually our rollout announced. Once we get the system deployed it will be in the hands of numerous individuals and organizations to give it a face and keep it going. The maritime amateur radio community is by far the primary leader in this effort, followed by existing HF receive infrastructure for aviation and coastal beacon data. If you would like to learn more about high frequency communications take a look at Part 97 of the FCC regulations and perhaps find a local amateur club who could further your understanding.

Why rely on the UT SDR for this test:
I believe this was clarified earlier but I will state it again. We are operating on a small number of receive sites to demonstrate the usefulness and viability of our system. Once deployed we will have many times more datasets to work with. However, until then we rely heavily on the UT SDR receivers along with one in South America, Oceana, and western Europe. We have been using this setup for small scale tests reliably for over a year with the notable outages caused by network issues.

To conclude,
Please take these and my previous comments in a constructive manner. I do believe you can find the resources necessary to meet the high availability requirements such an effort requires. In the future you could be saving hundreds of lives every month by your service, please keep this in mind. Thank you again for your correspondence, it shows your magnanimous quality as an individual despite the company you are involved with. Have you considered working directly with the UT SDR organization to facilitate these corrections? I am sure they would greatly appreciate your contact if for nothing else a sign of support.

With great interest
- Franchesco
Global Emergency Communications Director, ELT Specialist
Boating Industry Coalition
Retired emergency communications response lead
AT&T Global Emergency Operations