On 5/22/07, David Cantrell <da...@cantrell.org.uk> wrote:
On Sun, May 20, 2007 at 06:29:59PM -0700, Yoz Grahame wrote:
> I have heard of parts of America where it's used to send missions to
> air ambulance crews. I heard this from someone who was, at the time, a
> sysadmin for the telco which was providing the SMS network for these
> ambulances, which they had no idea about until they accidentally saw
> some of the messages queued during an accidental downtime.
That is Not Sane. Whoever decided to do that instead of, say, PHONING
THE CREWS needs a beating. With a phone call you really do *know*
whether your message got through or not, and if not, you can call
someone else to do the important work.
Having only one way to contact such crews is also not sane. Any such
system should have redundancy built into the process. In the case of
technical crews (not necessarily air ambulances) sending an email, an
sms, populating a trouble ticket db/website AND phoning the
responsible parties (on both of their mobile phones from seperate
providers and their landline as well) should ALL be done. Redundancy
is the name of the game when emergency response is needed. So for an
air ambulance id expect the crews to have radio, satcoms and mobile
technology.
Also, using sms has the advantage that even if a recipient is
temporarily unreachable they will likely get the message before you
can call them back. For example i can often receive sms'es in the
underground (s-bahn) here in frankfurt when an actual call will be
impossible due to disruption from being undeground. a sms needs a
second or so for transmission, which is probably less time than it
takes to exchange "hello"s on the phone.
As for the issue of unreliable delivery, frankly it doesnt match my
experience of using sms'es. While it may be true that it is
fundamentally unreliable its is practically very reliable, usually
close enough to realtime as to make no difference. At least here in
Germany.
Nominal hate: What i hate about SMS'es is that nokia left all the
swearwords out of thier t9 dictionary. ;-)
yves
--
Perfect is often the enemy of good enough.
