SMS Saves Lives
from the and-I-thought-it-was-all-bad dept
We've already shown how sending text messages via mobile phone can kill people, but now here's a story of people being saved thanks to SMS messages. A woman tourist trapped on a broken down boat in Indonesia sent an SMS message to her boyfriend in the UK. He contacted the coastguard who contacted the Australian Foreign Office who contacted Indonesian authorities, and the tourists were saved. What I still don't understand, though, is why she didn't just call for help on the phone?
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duh...
emergency help (if they have one) or the coast guard (which the apparently do have).
Of course, if she had a web enabled Imode phone and assuming the Indonesian coast
guard had a web page (and that's a rather large assumption), then she could despense
with the boyfriend all together.
In all probablility, she just got board and started SMSing... one thing lead to another
and now we have a publishable news blurb.
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No Subject Given
strong enough to support a voice call, but
was sufficient for SMS. That's happened to
me many times.
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Re: No Subject Given
strong enough to support a voice call, but
was sufficient for SMS. That's happened to
me many times.
Ah! That makes sense. Not being a big SMS user, I didn't think of that. However, it does say she received a call from the coast guard, so it sounds as though she did have a strong enough signal. But maybe she didn't when she first tried to call.
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Re: No Subject Given
Otherwise, nice to see a balanced and good opinion of technology leaking out now and then...
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Re: No Subject Given
money to spend on voice. Any penny-scraping technology that happens along get adopted
immediately by everyone. There's a lesson to be learned from that for those who want to do
commerce over wireless. In the states, if it doesn't arrive with full RFC822 headers, then
it's not a "message".
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SMS often cheaper than voice, related to prepaid
See GSM World for more on the topic.
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