This time the universitys 30,000 students promptly received email and text message alerts warning them about the gunman. The university website and Twitter account swiftly alerted the outside world to developments onsite.

via Virginia Tech shooting leaves two dead – Telegraph.

I hope by now that most large institutions such as Universities have implemented some kind of emergency SMS update system to contact students in such circumstances.

Well, that’s based on the system actually working as expected. The ability to be able to send a message to all 5,000 staff immediately (e.g. “Hello, come and empty your desk please, Mr & Mrs Lehman Brothers”) can only be a good thing, surely?

But as we’ve reported before, some systems haven’t entirely worked when they’ve been tested. Witness, if you will, the Louisiana State University text system screwing up during a test.

There are obvious implications here for the companies that have grown up specialising in emergency text services for colleges, universities and organisations.

The research by this Computer Science Professor is pretty direct. And it’s not the service providers to blame per se — it’s the actual operator infrastructure that is, typically, simply not built to send 10,000 messages through one or two cellular masts in one location, immediately.

The research conducted for the paper indicates that there are serious limitations in third party Emergency Alert Systems (EAS). In particular, because of the general architecture of CDMA, TDMA and GSM cellular networks, such systems will not be able to deliver a high volume of emergency messages in a short period of time. Through discussion, modeling and simulation, Traynor demonstrated in the paper that current systems not only cannot widely disseminate such messages quickly, but also that the additional traffic created by third party EAS solutions may disrupt other traffic such as voice communications, including that of emergency responders or the public to 9-1-1 services.

Cellular News has the full story.

The satellite will let ICO provide services including mobile TV, navigation and emergency assistance service “to be known as ICO mim (mobile interactive media)” across the US, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

According to the Washington Post, the company reckons its mobile TV service will be different to others on the market because it will reach even the most remote parts of the US. Add in the two way communications the standard allows, and it looks like ICO has an interesting service on its hands. Don’t expect it to turn up on your mobile any time soon – the company is using a standard that hasn’t really been adopted yet.

The system, called the Commercial Mobile Alert Systems, will see texts sent to mobile users including, presidential alerts, imminent threat alerts and child abduction alerts and possibly in the future, video and audio messages. The system will also be set up to deliver the messages to the blind and deaf.

There are two questions here: during disasters, will the network hold up? Anyone who was in London during the 7/7 bombings will attest how impossible it was to use the network for calls, texts or anything else. So does that mean there will be a priority system set up to ensure these messages get through? And secondly, the system delivering presidential alerts. During a crisis, surely the last thing people want to see is a George Bush’s gurning mug on their mobiles?