Emergency broadcast messaging coming to NYC
In a crisis situation, every moment is crucial in saving lives. Starting in early 2008, New York City will pilot a program that will deliver emergency notifications via text messaging alerts. "These messages could contain crucial information about the steam pipe explosion or subway flooding," says COO Paul Klein of Cellcast -- the company that will be providing the solution to the city -- "and these type of alerts can delivered even if wireless traffic had crashed the networks." [Via textually.org]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
PEZ @ Sep 22nd 2007 10:55AM
Lots of colleges, public services (even bars, bclubs and laundry services) are using SMS technology to deply messages like this.
As you may know, Colleges are really the ones the gov wants to implement a service like this. I think it will be mandatory at some point next year?
Anyway, develping a system like this is expensive, there are companies who have a drop-in, turnkey solution who can offer it up immediately for cheap money. places like Net Atlantic, Inc (www.netatlantic.com) that use standardized technolgies from GLM) systems and have relationships with the carriers are typically the best to go with
Cell guy @ Sep 26th 2007 2:35PM
You obviously don't understand the technology. Cell broadcast is a latent feature already in the carriers network. All you have to have is a phone with the feature enabled to receive the message. Also, cell broadcast sends one instance of the message to all phones, unlike SMS which sends a message per phone (assuming that the phone's owner has submitted their name and info to the appropriate contact). Cell broadcast works on an independent portion of the network and will work even if SMS and voice calls cannot be made. And, cell broadcast is geo-specific enabling a message to be sent to the cell towers in a specified area with the message reaching all subscribers and roamers. Cell broadcast doesn't replace SMS for many purposes, but is very nicely suited to emergency messages and other messages requiring potentially massive distribution.
Yankees368 @ Sep 22nd 2007 1:36PM
wait wait wait....how will this work even if the cell networks have crashed?
paul34 @ Sep 22nd 2007 5:55PM
ALERT: PARIS HILTON OUT OF JAIL