When text messages become mission-critical

The University of Connecticut is among the colleges reevaluating its emergency alert system and the role text messaging plays in getting out word of emergencies. The university originally installed Sigma Communications’ Reverse 911 system for alerting students over SMS. According to UConn’s chief information officer, Mike Kerntke, the system experienced high latency and was simply not fast enough in the university’s test runs.

“We had initially installed a system that we thought would do the job, and it didn’t do the job,” Kerntke said. “It wasn’t timely, that sort of thing. We have issued an RFD to look at alternatives to the solution that we have in place, while still working with the vendor to resolve some of the performance issues of their system.”

The ideal solution will allow UConn officials to send out text messages to those who register their cell phones with the university. Out of the approximately 30,000 constituents on campus, approximately 60% had already signed up for the service, Kerntke said. With some messages not being received hours or even days later on Sigma’s service, the university decided an alternative, and a message aggregator, was essential for the timely delivery of alerts.

“We just worked with a vendor that sends out a message,” Kerntke said. “We tried to work with the carriers and were unsuccessful on that. Carriers do not seem willing to work with individual institutions. They didn’t really give us a reason. My sense is that they don’t want to have service level agreements in place with that many numbers of different institutions. They would like to have us work through aggregator solutions.”

According to Sprint’s Lee, when a flood of messages comes out or goes into a given geographic area with limited infrastructure, delays will be the reality, and no carrier can make the guarantee that all the messages will get through. That being said, there are a lot of things that can be done in the handoff between consumer and carrier to mitigate the delivery issues. The first option, UConn’s original plan, is to establish a connection with every carrier and give them the power to handle the message handoff and delivery by whatever means they can. As Kerntke learned, however, this is not always feasible. The second, more common method would be to go through a message aggregator that already has a pre-established connection to one or many carriers and which can organize the front-end of the list-management process.

“By doing that, I am now – one of several issues – not going through that public gateway where everybody has access and everybody is going to be subject to that throttling and filtering mechanism,” Lee said. “Not to say you aren’t going to have any issues beyond that point. There are still other issues, but I’m going to be getting into a preferred connection, not the public one. I am going in the back door, so to speak.”

At UConn, the text messaging solution will be part of a larger ecosystem of preventative measures, including an emergency email list serve, Code Blue phones throughout campus for students to use if they sense a nearby emergency, blue warning lights on top of each phone and Web alerts. SMS alerts would be the final piece of the puzzle, Kerntke said, and the primary method his students have indicated they want.

The appeal of priority text messages is not just in emergencies, either. Take any big gathering or event – New Year’s Eve, the Super Bowl or almost any event on a local or national level that brings large groups of people together. Networks can get so congested that both voice calls and text messages take hours to get through – if they get through at all. This has always been an issue with voice calls, and as SMS becomes a more popular method of cellular communication, the perceived immediacy of SMS is becoming less and less of a reality.

“It is not as simple as, ‘Well, why we can’t just make it a priority so these things get through?’ In reality, this is the basic fact. This is just a law of physics. No system of any carrier has unlimited capacity,” Lee said.

Lee added that Sprint can bring in resources to accommodate large groups of people--for, say, a large sporting event--when that event is planned for and expected. An unplanned event, whether it be a natural disaster, school shooting or national emergency, throws a wrench in the plans and causes significant delays and hold-ups.

While Briere recognizes that the matter is simply about how much capacity a carrier has, he said considering that a significant number of applications are built around the idea that consumers can alert someone about something right away, something should and can be done to fix the problem. Building off the standards in place today, before reinventing the wheel, may be the best starting point.