SMS Alert Used In NY College Following Gunman Arrest
Students at John’s University in New York were warned about a man walking onto the campus with a loaded rifle 16 minutes after he had done so, causing the number of people enrolled in the alert program to more than triple from 2100 to 6,500, out of 20,000 students. The PC Magazine article treats it fairly, although it quotes New York Governor Eliot Spitzer as saying: “In the wake of the unspeakable tragedy at Virginia Tech, we have a vivid reminder of why a system like this is vitally important…Without the university’s effective planning and its community’s cooperation, this situation could have concluded quite differently.” The first alert was sent after the gunman was apprehended, so it’s unlikely the outcome would have been very different. However, it does demonstrate the usefulness of SMS as a mass communication tool, and the main benefit would have been to keep people informed and prevent rumors running riot in the campus.
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Comments (1)
Oct 1, 2007 9:32 PM
While I applaud the use of SMS as a way to potentially save lives, I worry over the dependency of using SMS in this manner. If you think about the message throughput of a carrier’s SMSC, when a carrier receives a request to send thousands of messages over typical load, you’ll always end up with messages in a queue which translates to latency. In a situation where every second counts, this could lead to some potentially disastrous situations.
In order to make a system like this really work, universities, airports, etc. shouldn’t rely on 3rd party resellers of SMS solutions - some who even have the audacity to use SMTP. The carriers need to step up, and create an alerting infrastructure which disables all binded carrier activities until a critical situation is averted.