Nortel, Tekelec vets say it's carriers' civic duty to offer emergency alerts

Notification solution vendor Velleros has a message for carriers, stated in the company's blog: It is the carrier's civic duty to provide mass communications portals that local officials can use during an emergency and leverage their robust networks to help save lives. The company, which received its series-A funding in January, is launching a full-force campaign to ensure they do just that.

Velleros, a supplier of high-capacity, network-aware content notification platforms, recently released its AlertSlinger, a suite of applications that automatically notifies a user-defined distribution list based on certain inbound and outbound calls. At the Comptel show in February, Velleros announced its first customer to deploy the platform. Houston-based i3, a wholesale network provider and aggregator, will offer the hosted solution to its 55,000 VoIP subscribers, cable MSOs, large enterprises and other carriers. While no other announcements have been made, Velleros is currently in trials with several other carriers and plans to sign deals within the year.

With AlertSlinger, users define how they want to receive alerts, whether over SMS, wireless or wireline voice call: VoIP, instant message or email. Depending on the services the carrier, Velleros's target customer, offers, its consumers can also select their notification method contingent on the nature of the alert. Joe Cobbs, vice president of operations for Velleros, envisions the alerting service being used for any type of weather alert, civic emergency such as a chemical spill, campus or University crisis or in the enterprise space.

The company's founders come from backgrounds in software and media gateway manufacturing. Combined, founder and vice president of business development Taren Patterson and Cobbs have more than 30 years of experience in telecom, with careers forged at Tekelec and Nortel's Genband center. Patterson said Vellero's heritage building robust carrier networks is what makes them well-suited to address the rapidly growing need for an emergency alert system.

"We saw the need last year," he said. "This space was going to heat up, especially with the events taking place, and we thought the carriers were the best, most logical provider based on the kind of network they already provide to add this type of service to the portfolio."

For the most part, carriers today do not offer any type of emergency alert system, yet most are looking at ways to incorporate it into their offerings. Patterson said that the solutions that do already exist for alerting, primarily from content aggregators, are largely inadequate. Most rely on email to SMS message solutions, which is both unreliable and extremely slow. According to Patterson, it has been well documented that the wrong people were hosting these solutions. As emergency situations are times of heavy network congestion, something more had to be done.

The solution Velleros came up with is all IP-based to offer more flexibility in managing network congestion. The platform resembles a softswitch with the capability of routing and translating groups of messages through various networks – both public and private, defined through software. The technology works as a push device to deliver the message through the appropriate network to the appropriate end user. Velleros has several patent-pending software algorithms to enable this network congestion control and throttling.

"We can throttle messaging at different rates to each one of the network elements individually," Patterson said. "So, we are never going to exhaust a given route through the network. It allows our carrier customers to engineer the capacity versus just dumping as many messages as possible onto a network. This works really well from an SMS standpoint."

One AlertSlinger chassis can notify at a rate of 576,000 voice-calls per hour assuming a 30-second hold time in addition to SMS messages and emails that are sent. According to the company's blog, this totals more than one million people that can be alerted per hour.

"We put that responsibility, that capability, to the carrier to be able to throttle the calls that come out over their network equipment, so they don't overload a switch or an MSC or downstream base station if it's a local area," Cobbs said. "Especially on the messaging side, because you would flood the local switch with SMSs and potentially bring it down. The more carriers we spoke to, the more important it was that we were able to do something to help them be able to provide network-aware throttling."

The Virginia Tech massacre and Hurricane Katrina serve as the flagship examples of why a service like this needed. Yet as school shooting or natural disasters continue to occur, the need for this type of service is continually validated, Cobbs said. As such, the service has gotten positive feedback from the carriers Velleros has approached.

"They don't offer the service, and they think that they can add to the portfolio relatively cheaply," he said. "It is an application that sits on their network as it is today, and they can potentially get additional revenue or they can better service their community. There is many ways they are spinning this to improve their image, reinforce their brand and make some more money."

The business model for the service is at the carrier's discretion, but Cobbs envisions a subscription service being the most viable. Other methods could include a pay-per-use model for situations, like an emergency, where the usage would be confined to a short timeframe. He also could see the service being paid for by the city or community using it for weather alerts and other notifications. Down the line, using advertisements to subsidize the cost of the emergency alerts is another practical option.