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Emergency Broadcast System Coming To Cell Phones

Posted by samzenpus on from the set-your-emergency-to-vibrate dept.

gambit3 writes "The Emergency Broadcast System that interrupts TV programming in times of crisis is jumping to a new format where it might be able to reach you better — on your cell phone. The communications company Alcatel-Lucent announced Tuesday that it's creating a Broadcast Message Center that will allow government agencies to send cell phone users specific information in the event of a local, state or national emergency. It will be similar to the TV alerts in that the text messages will be geographically targeted for areas where a tornado alert or major road closure, for example, is in effect."

9 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. Uh, would someone care to explain... by goobenet · · Score: 5, Informative

    You guys do realize that EBS (Emergency Broadcast System) was replaced by EAS in 1997, and is now being replaced by CAP (Common Alerting Protocol)... Guess nobody does pay attention to them when they blast em out of the radio or TV... The reason it *CAN* soon go to mobile devices is because CAP is an IP based distribution system instead of an "over the air" distribution system.

    1. Re:Uh, would someone care to explain... by arivanov · · Score: 2, Informative

      Cell broadcast and its use for emergencies has been part of the GSM spec since its inception. WTF is here to implement at all? All you need is to "have a word with the BSC" which inserts this into a paging message going to specific BTSes for specific cells.

      AFAIK, You cannot ship kit that does not have this. At least in EU.

      --
      Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
      http://www.sigsegv.cx/
    2. Re:Uh, would someone care to explain... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      When they changed from the Emergency Broadcast System to the Emergency Alert System, data was sent over the air. (thus the odd sounds) It was initially intended so as not to interfere with program viewing and not have people turn off the TV's to avoid the high pitch sound, but only "pop up" a message stating the emergency. Then they decided, gee, we shouldn't let someone watch TV and hear their program, if we can block punchlines in movies and TV shows, so they again silenced the audio, just for their own egos.

      Will your phone text messages get Amber alerts, saying some kid was taken by their now divorced parent? I get some emergency stuff via email now...only problem was I got 12 in the last day, saying it was going to be windy, is windy, and was windy. I now ignore those emails. I'd imagine the same will happen to the texts.

  2. Re:How will it work for travelling situations? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Cell Broadcast is part of the GSM standard, they might simply be using that. The operator can send a message to a cell which is relayed to every mobile logged into it, so if they send a message to all the cells covering a certain area then that's their emergency broadcast.

    Wikipedia

  3. Old by tsa · · Score: 2, Informative

    Oh how modern. We've had that here in Europe for years.

    --

    -- Cheers!

  4. ETWS by demiurg · · Score: 3, Informative

    This system is called ETWS (Earthquake Tsunami Warning System in Release-8 networks, i.e. LTE and PWS in Release-9. It is being pushed mainly by Japanese cellular operators (NTT DoCoMo, etc) and is probably used already in Japan.

  5. I'm working on this.. by mtxmorph · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm actually working on the handset side of this, so I can answer some of the questions people have about it.

    It's really not that complicated of a system. It uses Cell Broadcast Services (CBS) which are part of the existing 3GPP and 3GPP2 standards. Some of you may have seen CBS applications in your phones, but they're typically not used in the U.S. CBS is, as its name implies, a broadcast service.. so obviously it's one-way only. If your phone isn't "subscribed" to the particular message identifier (a kind of topic or category), or your phone isn't on when the message is broadcast, you'll miss it. The system has different classifications for messages, from nationwide alerts, to local alerts (like hurricanes), to AMBER alerts. There can't really be any way for operators to charge for broadcast messages, any more than they can charge for other broadcast resources like paging channels, so I think the only way your bill would be affected would be if they do some blanket 10 cent "government" fee for everyone... By the way, the reason they are using CBS is because it does not place a strain on the network, like sending millions of SMS messages at once would (that's important in a disaster situation when people might be overloading the network).

    The special handling on the handset side is to take some specific actions when an emergency message is received.. it has to play a special tone and vibration, among other things. You can opt-out of pretty much all messages, so don't get too worried about being woken up in the middle of the night for AMBER alerts (well, unless you want to receive them). The system supports a monthly test message, but you wouldn't be opted-in to those by default.

    The nature of the cell network allows operators to broadcast the messages to specific cells, so you are not going to get alerts for things happening elsewhere in the country. But the design also allows for national (presidential-level) distribution, so yes, in those cases, everybody would get the alert. The network-side of things is more interesting than the handset side, because of how different levels of the government need to be able to send alerts, and this is mostly what the article talks about (although it's short on details).

    If you have other questions, reply and I can try to answer them.

  6. Australia has had this for a couple of years. by mug+funky · · Score: 2, Informative

    this got introduced in Australia (at least Victoria) after the bushfires nearly 2 years ago.

    would have been better before the fires, but nm.

    it doesn't cost the user anything, costs a trivial amount to the gov't (when you take into account the running around they have to do before sending the warning, the cost of actually sending it is not bad), and it hasn't been abused so far.

    basically you get (or maybe not, or maybe you get it hours late) a message saying "WARNING. EXTREME WEATHER ALERT AT 8PM. STAY INDOORS" or something of the kind.

    i think only 1 warning was sent when there were some very hot gale force winds in the city. it was probably more as a test than anything.

    they didn't send one when the bowling ball sized hail smashed all our cars up though.

  7. Re:oh good, but then slippery slope by jrumney · · Score: 2, Informative

    But you don't know how it will work in practice.

    Cell Broadcast is a standard feature of GSM that has been there since the start. Usually the only feature enabled is area code or area name, but there is support designed in for all kinds of information services. At least on GSM networks, it would be foolish to use anything else. The tricky bit will be to automatically subscribe existing phones to the new emergency alert service, unless there has always been a code reserved for this and phones are already automatically subscribed to it.