Re: Web expert on his 'catastrophe' key for the internet

[Joe Greco <jgreco () ns sol net>]

> On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 5:38 PM, Joe Greco <jgreco () ns sol net> wrote:
> > As wonderful as the new communications paradigms are, do we also
> > have a situation now developing where it might eventually become
> > very difficult or even impossible to ensure out-of-band lines of
> > communications remain available?
>
> That's already a problem for getting alert pages. Any actual *pager*
> companies left? They all seem to have gone to SMS systems.

Well, USA Mobility was supporting ReFLEX pagers for us up until I got
tired of playing the tech support "try this alternate TAP dialup number"
game that seemed to be needed every year or so, because suddenly messages
wouldn't be delivered or would be queued for many hours (and these are 
two-way pagers we're talking about, the network knows where they are). 
That was probably less than a year ago when I got fed up and told them 
we weren't renewing. 

Relatively speaking, at&t's Enterprise Paging (which appears to just be
enterprise SMS with a TAP/SNPP gateway) has been a lot more reliable.  I
have no idea how reliable it'd be in a major telecom crisis, of course.

Aren't there still some satellite pager providers out there?  :-)

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.