4G America’s white paper questions 911-text reliability
4G Americas, a wireless industry trade association representing 3GPP technologies, has published a white paper that provides a technical and practical analysis of SMS as a means to contact 911 emergency services. Texting to 911: Examining the Design and Limitations of SMS presents a view of the capabilities, limitations, threats and vulnerabilities of this means of text communications for 911 notification.
The report notes that there are substantial limitations inherent in the design of the current SMS that make it impractical to be used for emergency service.
Some key observations and conclusions of the white paper include the following:
- No location information is available to the PSAP when a citizen initiates an SMS message and it traverses the network. Location is subject to whatever is put in the message by the originator, which may delay or misroute the message to the appropriate 911 answering point.
- Because the SMS service was designed and deployed to use only temporarily-vacant capacity in the networks, wireless operators have always described service/reliability levels as “best efforts only” or equivalent.
- No priority or special handling is given to SMS messages, so a potential emergency message would contend with the millions of other messages being processed at any given moment.
- SMS is not a real-time communications service. SMS messages is “store and forward” and thus may have a delayed delivery, may be delivered in a different order than the sender intended, or may be lost or discarded.
The white paper,
The white paper was written collaboratively by members of 4G Americas and is available for free download on the 4G Americas
Web site.