Communications and Technology Industry Research

Cellular text messaging is a phenomenon that seems to have taken over popular culture. While it provides a way for individuals to stay in touch and communicate information quickly, it also limits our ability to communicate effectively.

To better understand the impact that this communication channel has had and where it is going, 3G Americas (News - Alert) has published a research report focusing on the business of “texting”.

 

3G Americas is a wireless industry trade association that represents the GSM family of technologies that include LTE (News - Alert).

The association has released a report titled, “Characterizing the Limitations of Third-Party EAS Over Cellular Text Messaging Services,” written by Patrick Traynor, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology (News - Alert), and a noted expert in security for cellular networks.

According to Traynor’s writing, the use of text messaging or SMS has become ubiquitous and commonplace for recreational and business purposes. CTIA (News - Alert) – The Wireless Association has noted that text messaging has set new records in the United States, with 75 billion messages reported in the month of June 2008 alone – or 2.5 billion messages a day.

As such, SMS messaging is now viewed by many as a reliable method of communication when all other means appear to be unavailable. Some third party companies are now offering emergency notification services based on SMS.

"SMS is touted as being able to deliver critical information during disaster events, and such services have been purchased by universities and municipalities hoping to protect the general public," Traynor shared in a Thursday statement. "Unfortunately, such systems typically will not work as advertised."

According to the research that was conducted for this paper, there are serious limitations in third party Emergency Alert Systems (EAS), particularly due to the general architecture of CDMA, TDMA and GSM cellular networks. Such systems are not capable of delivering a high volume of emergency messages in a short period of time.

Traynor demonstrated in the paper that current systems also deal with additional traffic that is created by third party EAS solution that can disrupt other traffic such as voice communications, including that of emergency responders or the public to 9-1-1 services.

Traynor also demonstrated why EAS over SMS in current cellular systems is not feasible due to such limitations as: cellular networks are not designed to deliver emergency-scale traffic loads; cellular networks are not the Internet; targeting users in a specific location is extremely difficult; there is no way to authenticate the source; SMS is not a real-time service; and message delivery order is not always predictable.

“As reported by the media, we had a reasonably good demonstration of wide-scale text messaging efforts by the Obama campaign recently," Traynor stated. "However, even though the population participating in this campaign announcement was not necessarily as dense as a major disaster messaging effort, there were still significant message delivery issues reported similar to the ones described in my research paper."

The report concludes that it is critical that legislators, technologists and the general public understand the current limitations of these systems. Solutions such as the efforts undertaken by the Commercial Mobile Service Alert Advisory Committee (CMSAAC) set up by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC (News - Alert)) will allow cellular networks to take an active role during emergencies.

 

Traynor suggests in the report that through the creation of new standards, many of the problems created by current point-to-point architecture can be avoided. Specifically, by allowing each base station to act as a virtual megaphone, cellular networks will be able to rapidly distribute up to the moment emergency messages to all phones.

While Traynor has done well to demonstrate the limitations of text messaging, especially when it concerns Emergency Alert Systems, it is important to remember that SMS still delivers an important service. While it should not – at least at the present time – be considered as a viable replacement for legacy systems, it still holds considerable promise for the future.