- Voluntary outages in order to manage a limited power supply. Those are mostly planned in advance, and affect limited areas, usually on an alternating basis.
- Involuntary outages due to a supply or line incident. Those are obviously unplanned, and usually but not always locally limited.
Some electrical companies release the planning of their voluntary outages, in the press or on their website. Still, most people don’t think of looking at them and even when they do, don’t tend to memorize every single planned outage. And obviously, as far as involuntary ones go, they are always an unpleasant surprise.
I think electrical companies could do users a big favor by implementing an SMS information service. It would also help their image, which is usually pretty bad precisely because of power cuts. It would also be good for the VAS industry, given that such services tend to improve the image of mobile content, and compensate a bit for the relatively bad image of costly downloads and prize-winning games.
Maybe such a service already exists: I haven’t reviewed the status of SSA’s 47 countries on this. But I do know of at least a good dozen that could do with it, and don’t have it.
There could be two models for the service:
- Subscription: alerts received on the day of planned outages, with expected time and length of outage; alerts received when unplanned outages occur, with estimate of time of recovery.
- On-demand: SMS sent to shortcode, with MT providing information about ongoing and/or next planned outage.
Localization could be automatic, or by user input. In terms of pricing, I know a lot of people who would be willing to pay a premium for this, so I certainly don’t think it needs to be free: national electric companies are struggling enough financially as it is. I think a fair price, covering the electrical companies’ expenses, could make everybody happy.
Again, this is really just a thought, and I know that some electrical companies are so analog that they couldn’t implement this even if they wanted to.
by Alexander Grouet
The views expressed by Alexander Grouet do not necessarily reflect those of Mira Networks
