Manage expectations and perception of business through improved communication

The recent eruption of the volcano on Iceland has had a large impact on the aviation industry, but also transport by road, rail and sea as people try to find alternatives to flying while airlines were grounded. There have been reports of poor communication with passengers, for which both airlines and airports have been guilty. The confusion and anxiety caused by the grounding of flights could have been mitigated to some degree through better communication with passengers.

I read an interesting blog, admittedly from one of our partners, on the use of notification software to help improve communication during such incidents and improve customer service and the perception of the airlines. Their blog can be found at http://matthesderdack.blogspot.com/2010/04/volcano-ash-caused-information-chaos.html.

One way of communicating quickly and efficiently with a large number of mobile users can be found at http://www.hslsms.com/solutions/alertbroadcast/. This service is often used in parallel with HSL's WebSMS solution (http://www.hslsms.com/solutions/websms/)

Secure Mobile Messaging #1

SMS is not a completely secure technology and therefore using SMS for communicating sensitive messages could have severe consequences if the message was intercepted,. The technology is adequately secure for a number of purposes such as chat between friends or colleagues, news alerts and entertainment or informational content. For these purposes the use of SMS is appropriate.


In reality the uses to which SMS are put are many and it is often too convenient a technology that leads to its use being inappropriate for some purposes.


The vertical sectors that can benefit the most from secure mobile messaging and to whom disclosure of a message can potentially be catastrophic are financial, law enforcement, government and aviation. Even although most benefit is typically achieved by theses sectors, secure mobile messaging also has a strong place across most most organisations.


Why is SMS not secure? There are a number of stages at which an SMS message can be intercepted. GSM addresses some of these stages but none sufficiently to deliver complete security. For a message being sent between two mobile users belonging to two different mobile networks the stages are: (1) air interface, (2) transmission links and switches, (3) SMSC platform, (4) transmission links and switches (origin network), (5) transmission links and switches (destination network) and (6) air interface. The air interfaces in stages (1) and (6) are typically secured using A5/1 or A5/3 encryption, the latter being less common but increasing in usage, however it is possible to intercept SMS to or from a specific handset if you are using the same cell as the target handset. Once the message is away from the air interface the message is being passed unencrypted through infrastructure forming the rest of an operator's network and through infrastructure belonging to other parties. It is when a message is traversing this infrastructure that it is at its most vulnerable, and where a sensitive message has the potential to be disclosed.


All it takes is an employee of a mobile operator with access to the relevant equipment or links to "open up" your message and read it. There have been cases in the past where mobile network engineers have snooped on SMS messages without authorisation. Such casual snooping can be easily hidden as being related to a legitimate task so as to not arouse suspicion. SMS messages have even been illegally snooped on by government officials.

Using SMS in Schools

Making contact with parents when a school needs to can be a time consuming and therefore expensive task when someone has to pick up the telephone and speak with each parent. When the boiler breaks down, getting the local radio station to broadcast the news that the school is closed can allow a large percentage of parents to be reached but not everyone will get the news. When Sally didn’t turn up for school, in addition to John, Aidan, Karen, Paul, Kirsty, and fifteen other children, someone at the school needs to speak with a parent to find out why the child is absent.

As every parent typically carries their mobile with them, even when at work, the parent is instantly contactable. Add to this the instant means of reaching a large number of parents simultaneously through SMS, you have a powerful and scalable means of communicating instantly with parents when you need to.

SMS is integrated into a number of school attendance management systems and allows SMS to be sent by the school to the mobile telephone of a parent of an absent child. This capability to send SMS typically also allows broadcast messages to be quickly sent to parents even when the broadcast has to go to many, many parents.

During the winter months in the UK many schools were closed due to snowfall. SMS played an important part in allowing schools to communicate with the parents of pupils in such a way that the high number of parents that had to be contacted did not prevent them being reached before pupils would be arriving at the school. This direct, immediate and almost total communication is something that TV, radio or word of mouth cannot fully address.

HSL provides a number of services and solutions that can be used to enable communications with large groups of people. HSL WebSMS provides a web interface that can be used to easily send a message to distribution lists via a web browser. HSL AlertBroadcast allows a controller to send a message from their own mobile to distribution lists, thus removing the need to be at a computer to send a broadcast message.