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clrmoney
5/26/2017 1:53:25 PM
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AT&T Plans for Disease Control
I'm not sure about this from AT&T this money should be going to something else more meaningful and valubale than just this.
elizabethv
5/26/2017 3:38:16 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T Plans for Disease Control
@clmoney - I think using their name and knowledge to make communications between Centers for Disease Control that much better, is an extremely meaningful and valuable venture. It could potentially save lives, what's more meaningful than that?
afwriter
5/27/2017 11:37:41 PM
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Re: AT&T Plans for Disease Control
I think I get what @clmoney is saying, but I have to agree. What AT&T is doing is actually going to improve the CDC and save lives, not just offer faster speeds.
mpouraryan
5/27/2017 6:02:36 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T Plans for Disease Control
The need to have the best-in-breed communication process is critical. Look at what happened in London today as British Airways cancelled all flights--it is absolutely vital...
elizabethv
5/28/2017 12:21:07 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T Plans for Disease Control
@mpouraryan - I think communication is especially vital as we face terrorist threats continuing to be a part of our lives. I heard with the bomb at the Ariana Grande concert there were a lot of teens who had been dropped off at the concert, with the plans they had with their parents being to get picked up from the location the bomb had gone off at. That left a large number of minors unable to get to their parents, and I would imagine the burden on cell phone signlas in the area was quite overwhelmed. Some kind of communication systems that would have allowed people picking up their kids to then find them at an alternatrive central location would have been useful in this situation. And it's something that the CDC could very likely benefit from having.
elizabethv
5/26/2017 3:28:04 PM
User Rank Platinum
Great
This is great. This will allow AT&T a stable customer and source of revenue and the opportunity to continue working on newer technology that could potentially be rolled out to other customers. Not only that it potentially make our ability to head off a potentially massive epidemic before it becomes to widespread. Technology needs to be used for the communication of doctors and health professionals far more than it is now. We have the ability to send information to one another in a matter of seconds, and still if I want one of my doctors to have the surgical notes of a previous one, the process is cumbersome and takes far too long. This type of information could save lives.
srufolo1
5/26/2017 9:09:56 PM
User Rank Platinum
AT&T Modernizes CDC
It takes a lot of work to win a government contract, and for the CDC to choose AT&T for its modernization project, shows confidence in this carrier. This ensures a great source of revenue for AT&T for quite a few years.
mpouraryan
5/27/2017 6:00:26 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T Modernizes CDC
..and beyond what you noted, it is gratifying to see this especially as we await the new budget from Washington--and what has been proposed is needless to say, "..challenging"....
freehe
5/28/2017 5:07:24 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T Modernizes CDC
@srufolo1, we would like to believe that but as a former government employee that is usually not the case. Contracts are awarded based on who you know and sometimes on how much is given in kickbacks or bribes. In other instances it is based on lowest price not experience or reputation. Hopefully the CDC did award the contract to the best company.
srufolo1
6/2/2017 12:44:36 AM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T Modernizes CDC
@freehe That unfortunately sounds the way contracts are awarded for everything, not just the government sector. It's disheartening to think that things are not always on the up and up.
freehe
5/28/2017 5:08:45 PM
User Rank Platinum
AT&T Modernize CDC
The article did not mention how the modernization will benefit the CDC, its customers or Americans. I would be interested to know if this is just purely a benefit for CDC internally or will it provide an impact to Americans and external customers.
JohnBarnes
5/29/2017 5:42:51 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T Modernize CDC
freehe,
BINGO.
I found myself thinking that the AT&T spokesbeings sounded very much like many research university IT departments, which notoriously will try to leverage the budget into getting them the latest toys and the most impressive stuff while ignoring such basics as the need not to interrupt ongoing research, the need to maintain data compatability baselines, or even what the researchers actually use the software and hardware for and whether that might be perfectly fine as is. CDC being bigger than most university science departments and AT&T way bigger than most IT departments, the numbers are larger, but the fundamental attitude -- "don't bother with what you do, your job is to do it with what we want you to buy" -- seems very much alive.
I wish CDC had commented -- assuming they could have been allowed to comment honestly.
srufolo1
6/2/2017 12:53:14 AM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T Modernize CDC
@JohnBarnes Why did CDC not comment I wonder. It makes you feel as though something is not honest about this whole process, or that the agency is hiding something.
JohnBarnes
6/6/2017 10:52:02 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T Modernize CDC
srufolo1,
CDC may have been gagged by any number of policies at any number of levels; the decision to go down this road doesn't appear to have been completely theirs.
freehe
5/28/2017 5:09:52 PM
User Rank Platinum
AT&T Awards
"AT&T and the Department of Commerce and the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet) announced that the carrier will build a dedicated broadband network for communications between police, firefighters and emergency medical services (EMS). The initiative is an effort to confront the chronic problem of poor public network performance during emergencies."
Improving the EMS communications will be a huge help for communities. Does the contract extend to rural areas as well?
JohnBarnes
5/29/2017 5:45:51 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T Awards
freehe,
Great question.
And here's another:
Does the contract include anything about deployment, or is this a way for AT&T to develop a package at taxpayer expense and then sell it to the taxpayers at guess-who's additional expense? If CDC will be hosting the research effort, should AT&T be able to sell it for a profit?
dcawrey
5/30/2017 12:59:05 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T Awards
It's good to see the government update these systems. I know they are old school. They lack the proper efficiency and modern features that IT departments need today. Hopefully AT&T can do a good job modernizing.
vnewman
5/30/2017 1:21:54 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T Awards
Frankly, it is about time - the government is notoriously slow in making updates to any of its systems and in doing so, affects all of the entities that do business with them even in the private sector.
"They have a large legacy base of infrastructure" = all systems are old and outdated
elizabethv
5/30/2017 4:16:24 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T Awards
@vnewman - You're right, government agencies tend to lag in technological development, outside of the DOJ that is. And realistically, the CDC is a department that needs to latest technological developments. This will benefit everyone in the long run.
JohnBarnes
5/30/2017 5:22:51 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T Awards
Dcawrey,
Most upgrades are either adding needless features that some engineer thought were cool, or fixing bugs that should not have been there in the first place. They're just an excuse for the vampire tech companies to come back and feast some more.
Particularly in research, backward compatibility -- the ability to seamlessly reprocess archival data -- is vital. Having the latest and being up to date is not.
Government is one of the few places big enough and strong enough to force vendors to supply what is needed instead of the pointless "progress" peddled by the engineers and marketers.
elizabethv
5/30/2017 4:20:00 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T Awards
@JohnBarnes - as someone who is typically anti-corporation, I don't really see them selling whatever is the result of their research at a profit. I think most people who take grants to research anything end up selling the resulting product at a profit. Which I really just see as fair. They need to stay in business afterall.
JohnBarnes
5/30/2017 10:14:36 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T Awards
ElizabethV,
Well, here we disagree. What is developed with public money and at public expense ought to be available to the public -- but the big tech companies have been finding ways to get the public to pay once for development and again for deployment for a very long time.
afwriter
5/31/2017 5:18:16 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T Awards
It's not only tech companies, unfortunately. I live in a state where public money funded a multi-billion dollar for-profit sports stadium, and that is just the first example that comes to mind.
elizabethv
5/31/2017 5:59:53 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T Awards
@JohnBarnes - That's a disagreement I'm more than happy to jump ship on. Lol. I would be fine with not having to pay twice for such products. :-) I suppose I can understand where your argument comes from. Not sure how likely it is to change anytime soon. But I understand.
JohnBarnes
6/6/2017 10:40:25 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T Awards
ElizabethV,
It's a straightforward matter of two endlessly propagandized lies: that the market is always more efficient and cheaper, and that the big corporations actually operate in a free market. It's been a major stream in American politics since at least the civil war and maybe going back to Alexander Hamilton: we had the most advanced central bank in the world and destroyed it because it was "unfairly" squashing the thousands of shinplaster mills that backed President Jackson, and thus, to quote Bray Hammond, we entered the Civil War with a financial system perfectly suited to the Wars of the Roses. The Erie Canal, built by a government owned and run corporation, is still running (as the NY State Barge Canal) and a vital trade route; hundreds of canal companies existed solely to extract money from foreign investors. We made the world's first nuclear reactor and then handed nuclear power to the utilities, paying them to take it; built the world's best, cheapest, and most efficient postal system and then allowed UPS, Fedex, etc to cherry pick the few high-revenue streams off of it (and also to acquire many of the skilled workers due to forced layoffs).
So a quick look at CDC and AT&T is: CDC has some of the best data science programs (government programs, not computer programs) in healthcare, albeit running on very old gear because the government is a cheapskate (also known as being frugal). AT&T is back to the ways of its ancestor corporation: it hopes to have the government pay for development work, buy the gear, and probably get operating contracts out of it. None of this will improve anyone's health or knowledge but it will make AT&T a lot richer.
What can anyone do about it?
Well, we can start by pointing it out. The organization that landed on the moon is not necessarily inferior to the organizations that produced New Coke or the Edsel. The people who run the most powerful military establishment in history are not automatically bumbling doofuses compared to the sort of genius who drives a casino into bankruptcy.
AT&T's $119M Plan to Modernize Centers for Disease Control
I think this is very interesting witht he technology these days and will be great in thew future. The results will be shown in the future and i cant wait to see how this plays out in the future and will it succeed or will it go down. I also thinkthe plan is great and with the technology these days will be a good plan to moderize the society and the specs will be soon great again.
dlr5288
6/30/2017 3:40:13 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: AT&T's $119M Plan to Modernize Centers for Disease Control
This plan is huge! It will definitely be interesting to see where it goes and how it is all orchestrated.
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