Re: Paging - How do you receive?

[Don Westlight <westligh () OHSU EDU>]

> > How do you receive your pages pertaining to security, network...

It is important to remember that there is not much of a Service Level Agreement on cell-phone text messaging.  In the 
event of any sort of panic, or even carrier Internet gateway meltdown, your text notifications can wait over a day. 
((Our local carriers recurrently classify our email paging gateway or network management systems as SPAM....))  On the 
plus side, text pages are cached for when you turn your device back on.

If you have any sort of life-safety (fire dampers, medical attention, etc.) dependent on text paging, you may have a 
liability problem if you knowingly depend on the cellular networks, as this arrangement may not meet the minimum 
standard for responsiveness.

Traditional paging systems, while going the way of the dinosaur in many sectors, do have some advantages.  (1) Lower 
spectrum translates to better building penetration.  (2) Organizations that maintain their own paging systems can have 
high reliability.  (3) Redundancy

We use both.  If we were not also a Hospital, we'd just have cellular text.

Also note that IP telephony means that you can have 802.11 wireless devices with integrated text messaging (working the 
same as cellular text messaging in-house.)  We are starting to use this also, and the technology shows great promise 
for reliability/redundancy beyond what cellular can offer alone, especially with the control we have over the 
environment.  Application integration is a snap.

-Don Westlight
Oregon Health & Science University