From: Jim Richardson <weaselkeeper@gmail.com> Subject: Re: Web expert on his 'catastrophe' key for the internet
As wonderful as the new communications paradigms are, do we also have a situation now developing where it might eventually become very difficult or even impossible to ensure out-of-band lines of communications remain available?
That's already a problem for getting alert pages. Any actual *pager* companies left? They all seem to have gone to SMS systems.
Yes, several, although SMS is a better strategy today as far as I can tell. Skytel (now Velocita Wireless) has a fine 2-way network, which we used until early last year. We switched over to Metrotel, which had a smaller form-factor unit w/o 2-way which was better for us, for about a year. However, we have completely cut over to SMS for alert pages now. Multitech makes a nice little GSM modem that sits on a serial port on your alerting systems. I threw AT&T SIMs in them, wrote a tiny bit of glue to convert from email alerts to SMS alerts, and now we get all of our alerts using SMS. There's lots of open source code to handle the modems. It's completely out-of-band, even more so than our old touch-tone-phone-paging system was, so I'm actually happier with the total performance. Given that GSM coverage is increasing while pager coverage seems static or decreasing, SMS via out-of-band GSM looks like a great solution. Even situations like major power outages which would eventually take down cell towers w/o generators (or with malfunctioning generation) aren't a real concern because you usually have plenty of notice before the power goes all the way out... jms -- Joel M Snyder, 1404 East Lind Road, Tucson, AZ, 85719 Senior Partner, Opus One Phone: +1 520 324 0494 jms@Opus1.COM http://www.opus1.com/jms