sahana-nz team mailing list archive

[Gavin Treadgold <gt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2009-10-01, at 11:10 , Tim McNamara wrote:

> Shiny, et al
>
> Do you have any idea why a paid TXT alert service would run a few  
> hours late? http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/2921072/Tsunami-text-warning-fails 
>  Obviously, it's pretty hard to run diagnostics from a media  
> article.. but do you know where bottlenecks might occur?
>
> Is there anything that Sahana's SMS messaging system (Kannel /  
> SMSTools) could do to minimise this latency?

The only real option is to move away from point-to-point SMS and  
implement broadcast SMS. Most back-end SMS server processing capacity  
at Telco's is designed to handle usual peaks, not the surge of  
messages associated with an alert for an event such as a tsunami.

There is little that a non-broadcast system can do, as the SMS servers  
are still likely to get swamped by increased traffic from people going  
'Did you feel the earthquake?' etc. I don't believe there is much  
available in term of prioritisation of SMS either.

It might be very timely to raise this report again ;)

Public Alerting: Options Assessment
<http://www.civildefence.govt.nz/memwebsite.nsf/wpg_URL/For-the-CDEM-Sector-Publications-Public-Alerting-Options-Assessment?OpenDocument 
>

Most of the issues with SMS alerting should be covered in this  
document to a far amount of detail.

Cheers Gavin