Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Mobile Not Up to Emergency Tasks

"SMS is touted as being able to deliver critical information during disaster events, and such services have been purchased by universities and municipalities hoping to protect the general public," says industry association 3G Americas.

 "Unfortunately, such systems typically will not work as advertised." 
 
New research conducted for the association indicates that there are serious limitations in third party Emergency Alert Systems (EAS).

In particular, because of the general architecture of CDMA, TDMA and GSM cellular networks, such systems will not be able to deliver a high volume of emergency messages in a short period of time.

Current systems not only cannot widely disseminate such messages quickly, and the additional traffic created by third party EAS solutions may disrupt other traffic such as voice communications, including that of emergency responders or the public to 9-1-1 services, the analysis suggests.

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