Cell Bytes

In what is the exact opposite of what wireless operators and government have stated before, the wireless trade association 4G Americas, is claiming that text messaging is NOT reliable in case of emergency. Or at least that’s the way Rethink Wireless reports it, inaccurately in my opinion with the misleading headline “SMS cannot be trusted for emergency communications”.

The wireless trade association, 4G Americas, has warned of the risks of relying on SMS or instant messaging to contact emergency services, an issue it says is increasingly urgent for safety and cellular groups.

In a white paper called ‘Texting to 911: examining the design and limitations of SMS’, the body says there is a “perception that SMS is reliable; however SMS was never designed as a reliable means for life saving critical communications”. It has similar reservations about instant messaging, MMS and other varieties of ‘texting’ such as Twitter.

… “Today, voice 911 communication is the best and most reliable method of reporting an emergency and summoning help quickly. The industry is working on developing a reliable, non-voice solution to contact emergency services that is not based on SMS.”

This solution is called Non-Voice Emergency Services (NOVES) and is being developed by various north American safety organizations plus wireless groups like 3GPP. This could be applied to other countries too.

Here is what we’ve been told over and over again until this day:

Text messaging can be a fast, efficient and reliable way to communicate in the event of an emergency, it doesn’t clog cellular lines lines as much as voice calls. And, if more wireless users rely on text messaging in crisis situations, the people who need to make voice calls the most – emergency responders and 911 callers – can get through more easily.

Here’s a more accurate press release. The bottom line? Sending data by text could be made more efficient than the actual SMS system in emergency situations so the Wireless industry is working on a new and different text messaging system.

The industry is working on developing a reliable, non-voice solution to contact emergency services that is not based on SMS.” The report notes that there are substantial limitations inherent in the design of the current Short Message Services which make it impractical to be used for emergency service.

No priority or special handling is given to SMS messages, so a potential emergency message would contend with the millions of other messages being processed at any given moment.

– SMS is not a real-time communications service. SMS messages is “store and forward” and thus may have a delayed delivery, may be delivered in a different order than the sender intended, or may be lost or discarded.

– SMS was not designed with security mechanisms.

Read more.

Fascinating from Wired’s Danger Room, on cellphones and justice in Afganistan.

Afghanistan researcher Antonio Giustozzi recently found that the insurgents run an entire “separate judiciary,” outpacing the corrupt Karzai administration at resolving Afghans’ legal disputes. But a group of American lawyers thinks it’s possible to roll back the Taliban’s legal advances — all from Afghan cell phones.

Those lawyers have launched something called the Internet Silk Road Initiative, an effort to use urban Afghans’ heavy cell phone usage to bolster the country’s shaky rule of law. The big idea: a conference call.

The lawyers behind the Silk Road project, known as the Internet Bar Organization, want to pair traditional structures for adjudicating disputes that Afghans consider legitimate and match them with formal legal institutions.

The effort is just taking shape and there are a lot of obstacles to it. But the basic idea is simple. “People would dial in their disputes, a jirga would gather, the disputes would be resolved,” Jeff Aresty, the Internet Bar Organization’s president, tells Danger Room at STAR-TIDES, a demonstration of next-gen tools for nation building and disaster recovery. His central question: “How can we add some justice structure to the communications that people are already using?”

Aresty calls the idea the M-Jirga, for Mobile Jirga. It’ll be composed of “informal” leaders — local or provincial bigwigs, for instance — linked on the calls to government agencies who’ll enforce the decisions. He’s working with Afghan lawyers and the Justice Ministry to design the project and gauge interest in it. He’s also talking with a partner organization, FrontlineSMS:Legal, to design an SMS program where Afghans could text their grievances to the M-Jirga down the road.

Read full article.

Link: FrontLineSMS – What We do… Really