Greetings. In the wake of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, I'm seeing numerous news report speculations that mass cell phone text messaging should have been used to warn and inform the VT population about what was going on.

As I've discussed before in other venues, the current text messaging (SMS) infrastructure has relatively low capacity, and can be easily overloaded in ways that could not only delay the delivery of such immediate action warnings, but also could disrupt cellular voice communications as well, just when voice calling capability may be most needed.

An important technical paper that discusses SMS overloading issues in detail is very much worth reading.

--Lauren--