Out-of-band paging (was: Web expert ...)

Wed Jul 28 09:48:16 UTC 2010

From: Jim Richardson <weaselkeeper at 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 at Opus1.COM                http://www.opus1.com/jms