Musings on personal and enterprise technology (of potential interest to professional technoids and others)

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

SMS robustness: Emergency - The Key is "Communications that work", Robert Paterson's Weblog

Some practical and tested suggestions re: how SMS can be more robust than vanilla cellphone/voice during true emergency scenarios. Security/privacy issues may be different for SMS than standard cell-phone voice calls (let alone SMS per-message charges depending on your carrier)... And SMS let alone Twitter may not be the most common corporate communications tools just yet. However, it is easy to agree that as mentioned by Robert Paterson below (quoting Debi Jones), in those situations, indeed, the key is something for SMS seems to have an edge: Communications that work":

Robert Paterson's Weblog: Emergency - The Key is "Communications that work": "...It is likely in a very bad situation that cell phone networks will get jammed - what we are learning though is that SMS tends to get through - so Twitter as a feed may be the core of a good plan

Advisories have been announced on CNN and local San Diego TV stations asking people to limit their mobile phone use as the networks are saturated. This is a common problem during emergencies as we’ve seen over and over. The one component that continued to provide communication during the London bombings, post Katrina flooding in New Orleans and now in San Diego is text messaging. Twice today my mobile calls have been rejected with the network reporting, “all circuits are busy”. And yet, I’ve continued to be able to send out SMS..."

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