MRT Magazine: Emergency alert systems are needed more now than ever and spreading across campuses
May 30, 2008
MRT Magazine: ... CSU ultimately chose to work with Rave Wireless and its alert system. The company was founded four years ago with the idea of offering university-focused mobile content. It shifted its focus to university safety after the Virginia Tech shooting.
Rave Wireless distinguishes itself in the emergency text market by offering a redundant system that pushes text messages through multiple carriers, said Robert Jones, the company's marketing director.
“This market is a fast-growing one,” Jones said. “We try to focus on quality and performance. We had 15 clients a year and now we have about 45. Colleges have to get it right now because of the climate, and presidents are under a lot of pressure.”
Rave Wireless leverages multiple redundant data centers to make sure messages get through over several operator networks. The vendor also has relationships with multiple SMS aggregators, companies that have direct interfaces to mobile operator SMS networks. Using an aggregator provides many benefits for users, including service level agreements — which ensure throughput and delivery of text messages — spam bypassing, unlimited message size and delivery results documentation.
“Once you push those messages out to the carriers, you have to make sure they aren't experiencing a problem,” Jones said. “We've built a handset monitoring system, where we have phones in our data center. We send ‘heartbeat' SMS messages on our systems to make sure they are getting through major carriers.”
Even with these precautions and redundancy, sending an emergency message is still no easy task. CSU's first test of the Rave system wasn't as successful as expected. Some 20,000 messages were sent, and many took up to 35 minutes to reach recipients. Rave and CSU worked to improve the system, with the latest tests resulting in 23,000 messages being delivered within two minutes through several different operators.
Jones stresses that SMS isn't the panacea for notifying students and staff of emergencies. Universities should use SMS as part of a holistic approach that could include other notification methods such as sirens, voicemail and resident assistants knocking on doors to warn students to stay in their dorm rooms.
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