Be prepared. Know the facts from T-Mobile, AT&T, and VerizonWireless about messaging in emergencies.
"Capacity is limited... SMS is designed for 'busy hour' ...capacity would be exceeded quickly with emergency messages."
"...Severe network congestion that inhibits critical communications."
"...Not feasible or practical... significant message delays, or messages not delivered..."
"The wireless network is a shared infrastructure...it is physically impossible to dedicate network resources & radio channels to everyone that has a mobile phone."
"Just when people need them most, they might not work... networks aren't built to handle the extra load during emergencies."
"Cell-phone networks are not designed for everybody who has a cell phone to use it at the same time."
"The more subscribers there are in a particular cell or sector, the greater the chance of congesting... especially in disaster scenarios or trying to send too many SMS messages to that cell/sector."
"Message Delays - SMS emergency alert message delivery times can exceed 1 hour, and may require multiple of tens of hours for delivery."
"Lack of geographic targeting"
"Busy cell phone networks took hours to deliver key messages."
Hoax text message spreads...
"Not designed to support voice or message traffic for every end user simultaneously"
"It was not designed to be the network of last resort, and it would be too expensive to engineer it for that."
"Point-to-point or unicast delivery technologies (i.e. SMS, MMS) are not feasible or practical for wireless alerts."
