Text messages get SOS role

January 31st, 2006

When the tsunami hit Sri Lanka, Sanjaya Senanayake found he could not make calls on his mobile phone or regular land line at first - but he could send and receive text messages from his cellphone.

Senanayake, a 23-year-old television producer, spent last week reporting on the disaster, frantically searching for friends and posting his experiences to the networked world through a Web log, or blog - often via text messages relayed by a friend in Mumbai, India.

"It's a very easy, instant way to get the message across," he said in a mobile phone interview.

Experts say that thousands of deaths might have been avoided if warning systems had been in place to alert the people around the rim of the Indian Ocean of the tsunami. No such system exists there now. Those who design and use the wireless technology known as short message service, or SMS, currently used for chatter and advertisements, say it could be used to jump-start governments' nationwide and regional warning networks.

"This tragedy is going to put this more to the forefront," said Greg Wilfahrt, cofounder of SMS.ac, a company that sells text message services in more than 170 countries and has millions of subscribers in India, Malaysia and Indonesia alone.

The technology is wildly popular worldwide and has accompanied the international boom in mobile phone use, where wireless technology helped nations to leapfrog antiquated government telephone networks.

Even in parts of the developing world, mobile phones are everywhere: Almost half of the Malaysian population uses them, according to a recent survey released by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission. Three out of four of the more than 12 million subscribers send and receive text messages, according to the survey.

"The way they use the cellphones over there, it makes us look like amateurs," said Steve O'Rourke in Grass Valley, California, a director of the Asia Pacific Research Group, which has studied cellphone use. "I could be riding an elephant in the middle of Thailand and my phone would work."

Getting mobile phones into the hands of people living in remote, impoverished areas has been a major focus of economic development efforts for the "microfinance" movement, which involves giving small loans to people in poverty throughout the world to help them start small businesses.

Even a few phones might do the trick in the face of an impending disaster, Senanayake said. "Everybody doesn't need to be connected," he said. Instead, the message need reach only "one person in every locality who has a phone," and that person can spread the word, "even by getting out in the street and shouting."

"The cool thing about mobile messaging is you're not tethered in front of your PC, you don't have to be in front of your television," said Wilfahrt, the text messaging executive. "You don't always have your radio with you, but you do always have your mobile phone with you and you're always connected."

The idea of governments using mobile messages to communicate with citizens is beginning to take hold.

In April 2003, the government of Hong Kong sent out a text message to six million mobile phones to quash a rumor that Hong Kong had been designated an "infected city" for severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

The Netherlands, too, is building a network that will allow the government to issue alerts to cellphone users nationwide or within an area of a few city blocks. Citizens will be invited to sign on for the alert service. "You can direct a message to people who are close to an area where there has been an accident," and suggest they take another route, said Nanne Bos, a spokesman for LogicaCMG, which is creating the system.

Still, the risks and costs of false warnings are high. A false warning by the Indian government on Thursday that another tsunami was imminent caused tens of thousands in the southern part of the country to flee their homes, adding to the misery of the disaster last week.

That is why text message warnings "have to be enormously bulletproof," effective and virtually immune to hacking, said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In the past, he said, citizens have not been comfortable with the government having a back door to their personal technology.

An initiative discussed during the administration of Gerald Ford to mandate that all U.S. televisions be designed to turn on automatically for emergency announcements was dropped before it emerged from the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Katz said, because of fears that it would be seen as an Orwellian "Big Brother" program.

Ultimately, warning systems will go only so far to address the problems of disaster reduction, said Kenneth Allen, the executive director of the Partnership for Public Warning, a public-private partnership that urged that national alert systems be upgraded after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

"SMS is a great technology and should be used," Allen said, but he added that the promise of systems like text messaging should not distract policy makers from basics like education about the risk of tsunamis and how to spot natural warning signs like tremors and strange behavior of the sea.

"Strip aside all of the fancy technology," Allen said, and "it's getting the right information to people so they can make the right decision - and in this case, it didn't happen."