In an emergency situation, the SMS networks are likely to become congested. How are carriers making vital texts a first priority?

In the wake of last year’s Virginia Tech massacre, history’s deadliest school shooting in which the university was criticized for failing to provide reliable preventative action, universities across the nation have been quickly ramping up emergency alert systems to more promptly spread the word when a crisis occurs. A fundamental piece of this relies on SMS text messages, and a dependable method of reaching an increasingly ubiquitous network of wireless users may already be embedded in each handset. This technology, however, has gone entirely overlooked.

“Text messaging has gotten to the point where it is mission-critical,” said Danny Briere, CEO of TeleChoice. “Are the networks keeping up? No. They are clearly not keeping up with text messaging as a mission-critical application. The standards appear to let you do some rudimentary things to apply priority, but you really need to have more levels of priority and a more discrete ability to designate messages as being very high priority and have that accepted by everyone you pass it on to.”

The standard Briere referred to is the Short Message Peer-to-Peer Protocol (SMPP) priority standard, which uses a one-byte integer to allow wireless users to assign a zero for non-priority or one for a priority message. A designation of one means that the message will move to the top of the priority queue to be routed before other non-vital messages. While this open industry standard is in place, the priority service is not a part of any large carrier’s offerings to date.

According to Verizon and Sprint spokespeople, neither carrier offers a priority text messaging service to their customers. AT&T refused to comment and would not confirm if it had any type of technology in place to enable priority text messaging. Bruce Lee, public-sector industry solutions manager for Sprint, said that the industry is addressing these issues, but the landscape for SMS is much more complex than most realize. The main roadblock with text messaging that makes it significantly harder to manage than voice calls is the point-to-multipoint nature of the application. One SMS text can potentially be sent to 10,000 recipients, totaling 10,000 messages rather than simply one message broadcast out to all the receivers.

“That is probably one of the biggest misconceptions people have,” Lee said. “They think that a broadcast goes out one time to 10,000 people and it is still one message, so why is it getting blocked or filtered or slowed down? The reality is, that is 10,000 messages going out to a very small area in a very short time. That contributes to the issues where messages are not delivered in a timely matter or blocked or whatever it might be.”

In fact, Lee said that the carriers and the vendors at the front end have little to no control over what happens on the delivery portion of the messaging process. Issues such as the message content, volume and aggregation affect the ultimate delivery of the message. However, migrating to a more broadcast-like approach for SMS is the industry’s ultimate goal, according to Lee. Sprint is working with all the wireless carriers, including AT&T and Verizon, and the Federal Communications Commission to create a commercial mobile alert system that address the point-to-multipoint issue and makes it more efficient, thus reducing network congestion.

(continued on next page)