Tag Archives: New Year\’s Day
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Sri Lanka: President uses SMS to wish mobile users: Why not Cell Broadcasting?
At least some have first assumed it a practical joke, but Daily Mirror online confirmed President did send a New Year wish to all mobile users today. Using romanised Sinhala President wrote “Kiwu paridi obata NIDAHAS, NIVAHAL RATAK laba dunnemi. Idiri anagathaya sarwapparakarayenma Wasanawantha Wewa! SUBA NAWA WASARAK WEWA! Mahinda Rajapaksa” (As promised I delivered you an independent and free country. May your future be a success. Happy New Year!)
At the cost of LKR 1 per SMS message, this might have cost approximately USD 150,000 – equivalent to publishing roughly 75 full-page colour advertisements in national newspapers.
Sender’s number was hidden so the millions of mobile users, now constitute at least half of the population, could not return the greetings.
Had Cell Broadcasting (CB) been available in Sri Lanka, President would not have to use SMS – which is relatively too cumbersome for both the sender and receiver. CB would have been more economical too. Given that it uses a different band and sends messages together, it wouldn’t have congested the networks and the cost would have been certainly less than USD 150,000. As CB, unlike SMS differentiates users President could have even used a romanised Tamil message in ..read more
Network overload: Your message has failed
Greeting people by text message (SMS) has become a general behavior. Cellular mobile networks are tolerant to processing such messages on birthdays, weddings and other personal events of their customers. But the networks get chocked when gigantic wave of messages hit the airwaves. New Year is one such event when the mobile phone networks continue processing billions of messages for quite a while. But all networks are not necessarily capable of handing the traffic of text even in the developed economies. Recently the Americans have faced trouble with texting in this New Year. They have also complained network congestion after 9/11 in 2001. Regulatory intervention to ensure minimum QoS of the mobile services has become imperative.
Unicode compliant browser in Sinhala launched
Pasted below is a communication from Harsha Purasinghe of MicroImage that may be of interest to readers of this website.
“We are pleased to inform you all that Dialog Telekom launched the Sinhala & Tamil Mobile Browser and their Content Portal “SINHALANTHAYA” during New Year week. The browser can be downloaded by visiting http://www.dialogwap.com using your mobile and going into Application Download Area. This is the 1st ever launch of most successful Unicode compliant browser application. This application runs on wide range of phones starting from entry level low end Java Hand Sets, High End Java Hand Sets, Microsoft Windows Mobile Hand Sets and Black Berries.”
Keeping connected in the aftermath of a disaster (Lessons from 7/7 events)
By Jonathan Fildes Science and technology reporter, BBC News
In the aftermath of the 7 July bombings, people were understandably keen to talk on their mobile phones. Londoners wanted to assure friends, relatives and colleagues that they were OK; keep up to date with the latest news or find out whether anyone they knew had been caught up in any of the four explosions. Yet, while speaking on a mobile phone is a routine part of modern life, for a crucial eight hours on 7 July it became difficult, and for many, impossible. In some areas of London, the sheer number of people wanting to make phone calls was enough to bring the mobile networks to their knees.
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