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This has already been addressed. The government has required carriers and phones implement a system by which emergency messages can be broadcast from cell towers to phones. Not a point to point connection like a phone call, but a point to multipoint broadcast just like FM radio. There's no need to turn on the FM radio or tune in to the proper frequency. If your phone is connected to a tower in the affected area, you automatically get the broadcast. Your phone will make the annoying alert noise, and announces the emergency message at full volume over the speaker. I've already gotten several AMBER alerts and a couple severe weather warnings this way (I live near to a flood zone).

For emergency broadcasts during a long-term (multi-day) disaster, FM radios on phones are a poor choice because when the cellular network goes down, the power grid usually goes down as well. A phone is a terrible device for that situation because most people aren't going to be able to recharge their phones for the duration of the disaster. And although a smartphone with the cellular radio turned off will last nearly a week on battery, if you forget to put it in airplane mode (turn the cellular radio off) the phone will begin broadcasting at full power trying to find a tower and your battery will drain in probably a few hours. A car radio or transistor radio that takes AA batteries or even MP3 player with FM radio (if you've still got one of those) is better for that situation.

From CTIA's site, it appears to be an addon software tool, NOT part of the O/S or hardware:

Each device manufacturer and operating system signatory of Part I of this "Smartphone Anti-Theft Voluntary Commitment" agrees that new models of smartphones first manufactured after July 2015 for retail sale in the United States will offer, at no cost to consumers, a baseline anti-theft tool that is preloaded or downloadable on wireless smartphones that provides the connected capability to:

Remote wipe the authorized user's data (i.e., erase personal info that is added after purchase such as contacts, photos, emails, etc.) that is on the smartphone in the event it is lost or stolen.
Render the smartphone inoperable to an unauthorized user (e.g., locking the smartphone so it cannot be used without a password or PIN), except in accordance with FCC rules for 911 emergency communications, and if available, emergency numbers programmed by the authorized user (e.g., "phone home").
Prevent reactivation without authorized user's permission (including unauthorized factory reset attempts) to the extent technologically feasible (e.g., locking the smartphone as in 2 above).
Reverse the inoperability if the smartphone is recovered by the authorized user and restore user data on the smartphone to the extent feasible (e.g., restored from the cloud).
In addition to this baseline anti-theft tool, consumers may use other technological solutions, if available for their smartphones.

Source: http://www.ctia.org/policy-ini...

The idea that Google is going to make money on subscription services is dubious.

By wireless I assume they mean Cellular.

Marketing Cellular to "sub-Saharan Africa" might work because The number of mobile phone users in sub-Saharan Africa rose by 44 per cent to 475 million, compared to just 12.3 million fixed line connections, representing the highest proportion of mobile versus fixed line connections in the world.

By comparison, there are only 326 million subscribers in the US.

(There is little street level wired infrastructure there, and cellular is the big player. (pdf). )

So cellular penetration is already bigger there than you might imagine, and apparently there is no problem affording handsets, and computers. So if there is enough money to buy equipment there is probably enough money to support advertising.

I would worry more about becoming targets for muslim extremists than failing to gain traction due to poor market conditions.

The average cell phone usage is 459 minutes/month * 300 M cell phones / 2 * 60 sec * 3 KB/sec = 13,000 PB/month (uncompressed).

Why the "/ 2"/ Assuming that every phone call made from a cell phone is also to a cell phone? And not doing compression, but doing dedup?
I don't know how others use theirs, but most of my phone calls aren't social, but to businesses and their land lines.

Anyhow, CTIA lists 2.30 Teraminutes yearly per December 2012. Presumably that's also counting cell-to-cell twice, which I'm sure the three letter agencies would record twice too (if nothing else to record what was said when there's a drop-out in the connection on either end). That's 138 Teraseconds, which at 3 kB/s would be 414 PB per year, before compression.
That's a far cry from your 13,000 PB per month (or 156 EB per year), and spread out over multiple providers absolutely doable from a capacity viewpoint. Especially since it doesn't have to be online for a year, but can go on tape. If ten datacenters recorded this, with a fluctuation of 40% in data density between them, and flushed everything to tape within a week, each would need less than 2 PB of online storage.

But do I believe they do so? No. If they did, they wouldn't have a way to mine the data. It would possibly be useful as evidence after the fact, but not for monitoring purposes. It's way too much data.

So lets assume that this hasn't seriously changed (prices per unit storage tend to drop pretty reliably). ~$3M for a machine to store every text by every person in the US, assuming the average person sends less than 16 messages per day (I am pretty sure its way less than that)....not too shabby really....but still a bit pricey....

Your 16 messages a day was actually slightly too low (though it's spot on for an estimate) so no it isn't "way less than that".

Page 7 of http://files.ctia.org/pdf/CTIA_Survey_MY_2012_Graphics-_final.pdf says that 2.273 trillion text messages were sent from July 2011 to June 2012, which is 20 per day each for a population of 310 million.

So that's about 4.4 trillion messages that they're going to need stored? http://www.ctia.org/consumer_info/service/index.cfm/AID/10323

"the intended effect (fast track approval) didn't happen."

Actually, it did, in a way. The fast track process was started, the filing was accepted in one day (a process which normally takes months). The normally required 30 day comment period was reduced by the FCC to an effective 5 1/2 days (it was 10 days, but across a long US holiday weekend). Granted, the actual approval didn't end up happening, but not because the FCC didn't try to help them out. It was an alert CTIA which filed an extension request, and alerted GPS users of the potential issues.

I wasn't talking about the summary, which looks quite fine to me. In the press release, they call the system "a newly-developed rating system that six mobile application storefronts will voluntarily support as part of their application submission (or onboarding) process" (emphasis mine). That "onboarding" word is something I don't like.

First: Is there any sort of method in-place wherein a message can be repeatedly broadcast, but only alert subscribers on the first successfully received message?

Yes, that's part of the CBS specification and and the emergency system uses this as well. The messages are broadcast for a set amount of time at a set repetition rate. They also contain serial numbers so that the handsets can distinguish between old and new messages. There is also a provision for sending updates to messages which have already been transmitted.

With what geographic granularity will the broadcasts be sent (or perhaps more properly, received)?

I'm not sure how granular it will be in practice, but it could technically get down to the individual cell level. Most likely, the carriers know which cells approximately serve which zip codes and would group based on that. The specs don't say exactly how this should be done, except that the "Cell Broadcast Center" should determine the affected cell sites for the geolocation (geo-code, polygon, circle) of the emergency message.

Third: Is there any pertinent documentation available that I can ogle?

There really isn't much documentation which is publicly available. Here are a few things, although they're short on real details:
Announcements: FEMA FCC CTIA
Standards (paywalled): ATIS 0700006 Joint ATIS/TIA J-STD-100

Sorry I don't have links to the actual specifications content. For some reason, you have to be a member company or pay for them.

I should have referred to the system by its proper name -- in the U.S., it's called the Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS). There are similar systems being set up in other countries which closely follow the U.S. specifications, and those systems should be compatible with CMAS (at least that's the plan).

Of course, the numbers will just be ignored by folks who swear that that one woman who they saw run a redlight four years ago are the rule, because it's the eleventy thousand perfectly normal, not in any way out-of-the-ordinary things we see happen every day that we remember perfectly.

* Total fatalities, fatalities per X drivers, fatalities per X miles driven ...

Oh, it's a problem all right:

http://wjz.com/local/black.guerrilla.family.2.1008915.html

This was just one of a number of problems we've experienced recently. We've also been treated to the sight of a prison guard and inmate working in tandem to extort money from the family of another inmate for not killing him.

The CTIA's position is kind of interesting and involves the expenditure of lots of taxpayers' money:

http://www.ctia.org/consumer_info/wow/index.cfm/2009/03/

Don't know if it's a problem elsewhere, but it's a huge problem here in Homicide territory.

http://www.ctia.org/content/index.cfm/AID/10352

and here:

http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/articles-resources/consumer-code.jsp

The seventh right is the one that says they'll let you out of the long term agreement if they change the TOS. The code may or may not have the legal weight of the TOS, but it makes for a good starting point when dealing with a customer service rep. I used it to get out of a contract about a month ago when they changed the arbitration agreement. The CRS agreed to allow me to go month-to-month. In the long run, AT&T benefitted because I used the freedon to get a bigger, better phone that required a beefier data plan, so it was win-win. Just remain polite and firm with the CSR.

More details are available here:

http://consumerist.com/228186/script-for-escaping-cingular-contracts-without-fee-based-on-new-arbitration-clause

Wow wow, that sounds nuts to me? Where did you get the idea that in "most of the country" there's no GSM coverage? I'd love to see the statistics about that.. I don't suppose you have any? Here's the coverage map for ATT btw http://www.wireless.att.com/coverageviewer/. I guess it's possible that including Alaska covered vs uncovered could be CLOSE ... but I'm not sure. If you count any cell coverage, (CDMA, smaller companies, etc) you're dead wrong.

"So few American have cell phones" ... I gotta see your statistics on this, the only people I know that don't have phones are my 85-90 year old grandparents. Do you really believe this bull? Just what do Europeans believe about us?! most of the US doesn't have coverage and most people don't have cellphones? Gotta say, when you're so wrong about the basic facts upon which you make your slander, it really makes me take the rest of your post less seriously. 82% of Americans Own Cell

Ummm, according to CTIA, more than 7 billion texts are sent per month in the US (approx 235 million per month):

http://files.ctia.org/pdf/Wireless_Quick_Facts_Oct ober_05.pdf

Actually, according to the CTIA (the "official" wireless association), over 7 billion messages were sent in June of last year. It is now over 8 billion a month (according to some parenthetical remarks) meaning we're approaching 100billion annually in the US alone a year! You can get the CTIA info here:

http://files.ctia.org/pdf/Wireless_Quick_Facts_Oct ober_05.pdf

By the way, i run a mobile tech company, if you're interested in learning more: http://www.cellitmarketing.com/

Once again people post crap without looking anything up....aside from being off topic you're wrong. Here are several articles from the cell phone and petroleum industries which are provided below to give you the correct information.

Petroleum Equipment Institute (PEI)-

                        http://www.pei.org/static/

Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) -

                        http://www.ctia.org/news_media/press/body.cfm?reco rd_id=377

                        http://www.ctia.org/news_media/press/body.cfm?reco rd_id=407

Urban Legends -

                        http://www.snopes.com/autos/hazards/gasvapor.asp

American Petroleum Institute (API) -

                        http://api-ec.api.org/media/index.cfm?objectid=4BB B0597-308E-49BE-9F513DE9A8B0C156&method=display_bo dy&er=1&bitmask=001007000000000000

Wired News -

                        http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,58188,00 .html

Once again people post crap without looking anything up....aside from being off topic you're wrong. Here are several articles from the cell phone and petroleum industries which are provided below to give you the correct information.

Petroleum Equipment Institute (PEI)-

                        http://www.pei.org/static/

Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) -

                        http://www.ctia.org/news_media/press/body.cfm?reco rd_id=377

                        http://www.ctia.org/news_media/press/body.cfm?reco rd_id=407

Urban Legends -

                        http://www.snopes.com/autos/hazards/gasvapor.asp

American Petroleum Institute (API) -

                        http://api-ec.api.org/media/index.cfm?objectid=4BB B0597-308E-49BE-9F513DE9A8B0C156&method=display_bo dy&er=1&bitmask=001007000000000000

Wired News -

                        http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,58188,00 .html