September 21, 2007

Emergency notification researcher to race e-mail against text messaging

Purdue University will put both to the test Monday (Sept. 24) to see which technology does the best in reaching students, faculty and staff.

The planned test, which originally was designed just to see how well text messaging works, grew this week when Purdue officials found a way to speed up e-mail. Whereas in the past an e-mail might take one to two hours to reach all 50,000 members of the campus community, a new system appears to be able to send campuswide in 10 minutes.

"Historically, e-mail has been substantially slower than texting," said Scott Ksander, Purdue's executive director of information technology networks and security. "We have been working on that in our offices of Information Technology and University News Service and believe we have found a way to make the e-mail competitive."

The test messages will be sent at 11:25 a.m. Monday (Sept. 24). Texts will be sent to more than 10,000 volunteers. The e-mails will be sent campuswide to more than 50,000. Each recipient will be asked to respond so that researchers can track the actual time it takes to deliver messages to a mass audience.

Following recent highly publicized events, universities have been challenged to find ways to quickly communicate with students in crisis situations. But the limits of current technology are not well understood, and high-volume testing of technologies like text messaging has not been previously conducted.

Many variables can delay the delivery of text messages, including cell tower proximity, signal strength and system traffic volume.

"When we need to send an emergency message, time is the most critical factor. We have seen reports of text messaging rates as low as 200 to 300 per minute in some environments, while we have some vendors making unbelievable claims of thousands per second," Ksander said. "We need to measure the environment available at Purdue, do a good engineering analysis on the systems, and understand technical and process changes we need to make to ensure that delivery times are at an acceptable level for mass emergency notification."

Ksander said the study results will be shared with other universities and emergency planners after the results are compiled.

If the testing is successful, Purdue may add text messaging capabilities to its existing integrated emergency notification system.

Writer: Steve Tally, (765) 494-9809, tally@purdue.edu

Source: Scott Ksander, (765) 496-8289, ksander@purdue.edu

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu

Note to Journalists: A news conference on the testing will take place 11 a.m. Monday (Sept. 24) at the Purdue University Police Department. Scott Ksander and others will be available to talk to journalists after the text messages have been received.

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