TAB Queensland drops pagers for SMS - News - Communications

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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TAB Queensland drops pagers for SMS

By Andrew Colley, 0
October 11, 2002
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/TAB-Queensland-drops-pagers-for-SMS/0,130061791,120269001,00.htm

Queensland TAB is today expected to launch a limited implementation of a custom SMS-based messaging system that will eventually render field workers' conventional pagers redundant.

Initially the company will send the SMS-based system live to serve the company's game technicians but over the coming weeks it will customise middleware that will allow it to phase out pagers across its entire mobile workforce.

"We want to get away from paging totally and go to SMS," said Paul Toonen, manager, network services, TAB. "We haven't implemented that yet...we will soon. Hopefully within the next few weeks we're going to start phasing it in".

According to Toonen, reliability was at the heart of Queensland TAB's business case for implementing the SMS-based system.

Toonen explained that that while SMS was only slightly cheaper than pager-based system, pager messages can be "lost" while it's harder to lose SMS messages as they are stored and delivered as soon as a mobile phone re-enters the range of telecommunications a base station.

According to Michael Leishman, project co-ordinator for Queensland TAB's system engineering group, the ability to leverage mobile networks was an important consideration as the company's technicians are often working in regional parts of the state.

Leishman said the rollout would occur in two stages, to be completed during the next three to four weeks. The first stage involves making the system compatible with the gaming company's automated help desk.

The engineering group has installed middleware on gateway equipment at Telstra to allow its messaging apparatus operate over the carrier's mobile networks.

"All our host systems write-out to the paging system, now we're going to make them write out to the SMS system," said Leishman.

The TAB Information Systems team's main task is to ensure that the system is smart enough to work in the SMS environment. Leishman said that without special filters, the TAB's automated notification mechanism may send 50 SMS messages relating to a single fault.

The second phase of the program involves implementing a desktop messaging application.

According to Leishman, Queensland TAB's field worker communication system generates message traffic in the order around of around 1000 messages per week.