In an emergency, the new Buckeye Alert System will send a text message to everyone who has signed up for the service.
With the potential to reach more than 50,000 customers, the question is: Will it work?
According to Ohio State officials and the company providing the service, the answer is yes.
All the messages could be sent in “just a few minutes,” said Ellen Grevey, spokeswoman for Twenty First Century Communications, the company providing the text-messaging service to OSU.
OSU is encouraging all students, staff and faculty to sign up for Buckeye Alert so they can be notified if there is an emergency on campus. `
According to the OSU Web site, there were 51,818 students at the Columbus campus last autumn, not including faculty or staff. If all those people signed up, Grevey said the Buckeye Alert system would still be able to send out all the text messages in a timely fashion.
She said OSU administration would create the message in an Internet program and then send it through the Web, the same way normal text messages are sent.
The Buckeye Alert service, however, is subject to normal cell phone carrier congestion and delays, Grevey said.
“If there is storm activity and the Internet or cell phone towers are down there will be delays,” she said. “The advantage with text messaging, as opposed to a phone call, is when you send the text, it sort of hovers in cyberspace waiting for the Internet to come back. There might be a delay, but the message will go through.”
Bob Armstrong, director of emergency management and fire prevention at OSU, is also confident in the system’s ability to send out a high volume of messages. He said the service will be tested a few times each year to ensure it is working properly.
“We’ll just send out a text message to make sure the system works,” he said. “It tells us how many notifications go through and how many do not go through. Then we can take some time and follow up with those that did not go through … to find out what the cause may have been.”
Erin Brigati, a senior in consumer affairs, does not think sending 50,000 text messages at once will be a problem.
“I send group texts all the time,” she said. “If it is set up on a computer, they could probably send 50,000 messages at once, so I don’t think it would be an issue.”
Anyone interested in signing up for Buckeye Alert can do so at buckeyealert.osu.edu.
