I was wondering if a building were to make an update to their fire alarm system that would now use wireless emergency alerts instead of audible/visible signals. One thing I know is that wireless emergency alerts are more than just a loud horn or some voice evac speaker. When an initiating device is triggered, it sends its device address and name to the fire alarm system so it can pass on to the building’s wireless emergency alert system. It then sends out a wireless emergency alert saying that there is a fire and shows the initiating device’s address and name.
Is this form of alerting people to a fire better than just a audible/visible signal, or does it need more than just that (TV override and desktop alerts)?
I’d say that fire alarm systems will likely always have notification appliances for several reasons including ensuring that occupants know about a fire in progress: what if the cell phone network happens to be down in a particular area & thus no wireless alerts can occur in it? Another potential issue I can see that would cause systems to stick with traditional NAs is signal interference from more than one fire alarm system in the same area.
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So SMS alerts like text alerts should be another acceptable form of notification other than wireless emergency alerts?
I don’t know about that: for one thing they’d be just as vulnerable to the cell network going down as EAS alerts, & of course for another existing fire alarm systems with their notification appliances notify people just fine as they are already (keep in mind that “newer”, “more advanced”, & “wireless” all do not always translate to “better”).
You seem to really want wireless phone alerts to completely replace notification appliances for some reason: why is that?
They’re less disturbing, and they also come up on computers and tablets. But as of now, every commercial building needs a notification appliance.
Yeah, though if you really want a less disturbing kind of notification, push for chimes & chime/strobes (or voice systems with chime tones) to be used everywhere instead of just in certain applications like hospital systems, heh.
That may be the case but traditional notification appliances alert everyone in a building regardless of whether they’re looking at an electronic device or not.
Yeah. Both notification appliances and SMS alerts are needed and just so happen to be the best combo yet in my opinion. So it’s best to have notification appliances and SMS alerts that pop up on computers, tablets, and smart phones.
Not really as evidenced by the actual industry continuing to stick with traditional notification appliances, which as I already said have the advantage of alerting everyone in a building regardless if they have an electronic device with them or not, not to mention being less issue-prone & complicated in general: basically, to put it simply, what’s already being used clearly works fine & so there’s no real need to move from that.