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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.

SMS is good for a stop-gap solution where no other one exists. I
wouldn't say it would be a desired solution. 

A broadcast can target an infinite number of receivers without any
impact on the headend and no scaleability issues. With SMS you run into
scaleability issues, management issues, etc. 

Half the phones out there aren't designed to utilize SMS as an 'alert'
(i.e. you have to create a Flash SMS PDU payload to force it to appear
on a user's screen). Plus ofcourse SMS by its nature is self-limiting. 

One can do a lot more with a digital terrestrial signal and a data
carousel (minus the 'i am alive' functionality, but that can be achieved
with GPS trackable handsets, without needing to waste network resources
transmitting heartbeats back to a host (more scaleability issues..)).

Just my 2c (been down this path before!)

Cheers
Kon



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