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Subject: RE: [emergency] FYI: Cell phones to be used as data source in disasters
Kon Wilms wrote: > Unfortunately our (USA) present digital terrestrial broadcasting > modulation scheme and its lack of mobile reception prevents us from > doing this. But, we can at least do things like send SMS Text messages to people when we get earthquake announcements. CISN and USGS do that now and we'll be generating SMS messages off our data at PubSub soon as well. Another interesting application of cell phones to the problem of emergency info would be the "I am Alive" service that was discussed in http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-baker-alert-system-00.txt . An overview of the "I am Alive" service can be found at: http://www.isoc.org/inet2000/cdproceedings/8l/8l_3.htm While such a service might increase the amount of SMS traffic after a disaster, we might find that we could profitably trade off SMS traffic for voice links. My assumption is (I'm not a telephony expert) that SMS traffic is probably easier for the network to handle then a potentially long voice session. Convincing people to get in the habit of sending an SMS message to some "I am alive" service that could be queried over the Internet might reduce the number of people who try to make calls into impacted areas during emergencies and thus free up bandwidth for more important calls. bob wyman
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