Are You At Risk?

by MMI

Texting While Driving (TWD) At An All-Time High

People are everyone, and sadly enough, this now means that cell phones are everywhere. They’ve made their way into our homes, our work, even our schools and our car rides. What troubles me the most is the clear and present danger our cell phones, specifically text messaging capable cell phones, pose to the everyday driver.

The facts are alarming. For the past 15 years, the percentage of Americans owning a cell phone has risen to a mind-boggling number. According to the 2006 annual report released by the Bureau of Transportation, cell phone users in our nation have pole-vaulted from 34 million a decade ago to more than 203 million today. A recent MIT survey ranks the cell phone as the invention that American’s hate the most but cannot live without, beating out other recent technological fads such as the alarm clock and the television.

With such a rampant increase in cell phone subscribers, the cell phone powerhouses, led by Nextel, Sprint and Verizon, are inventing new cell phone features to allow us, as impulsive communicators, a handful of new ways to stay in touch. The most recent, and arguably the most dangerous and annoying, feature made popular by the masses is called text messaging. Text messaging is exactly what is appears to be, message by text. Americans, mainly the younger generations who can’t wait the length of a simple car ride to relay a message, can communicate messages by simply pressing those tiny numbers on their cell phone keypad.

Like every new fad, there are obvious advantages to text messaging. For instance, you can have an entire conversation in complete silence without using any of your highly regulated cell phone minutes. Text messaging also allows the growing generations of impersonal communicators yet another mode of distant communication transportation, allowing a person to say hello without actually saying anything at all. Advantages aside, Americans, myself included, should begin to start asking a very important question: “Is text messaging putting us at risk?”

Not a day passes where I don’t see someone Texting While Driving (TWD). Just yesterday, a friend called explaining how he himself had witnessed this type of accident. It was your typical TWD horror story. What made this accident unique was that each driver was TWDing at the time of the crash. With this risk in mind, a solution has to be publicized. ATCOM is here to make us safe.

ACTCOM Business Telecom Solutions, a communications solutions provider with offices in Raleigh, Charlotte and the Triad, are encouraging a new technology that solves this growing cause of distress and danger. Experts from ATCOM advice cell phone users to consider purchasing a new technology called text-to-text speech module. As part of a unified messaging platform, text-to-text speech amazingly enough allows users to have cell phone messages read to them while they drive. Users quickly and more importantly, safely, respond to the message by hitting a reply key and speaking directly the cell phone. Yes, life can be this easy.

For most of us, text-to-text speech module won’t be picked up or even looked at for quite some time. With that reality in mind, do yourself, as well as all drivers around you, a huge favor this weekend. Don’t Text and Drive.

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