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Emergency Broadcast System Coming To Cell Phones
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."
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.
"This is a test of the local emergency cell phone text system. This is only a test. If this had been an actual emergency, hopefully you haven't disabled text alerts in the middle of the night after receiving all our obnoxious tests."
Got to see it successfully used when my neighborhood had to be evacuated for a forest fire. They kept us up to date on about 15 - 30 minute intervals with evacuation news. It would have been amazing to have it available from the cell phone at the time. I remember running around everywhere preparing to get out of the house, it was irritating to have to drop what you were doing to find the traditional phone. Sounds like good stuff.
More than likely they aren't going to bother trying to send it to a number.. but rather have the towers in the effected area send out the broadcast message to all associated radios
the ability to do this exists already - your phone would get it and accept it because text blocking is done at the exchange level not the phone (it could be done at the phone but 99.999% of the time it isn't)
i'm sure wouldn't be billed because if they send it at a tower level and not exchange level their normal billing message counting system would not be in place and would have to be changed to support it - which i doubt would happen as this would be just yet another government mandated thing.
while i like the idea - and i completely understand and agree with the need for something like this..
i'm more concerned with it's use as security theater abuse (have it only send to radios in air ports? can we have some fun with that?)
Also.. all the dumb asses on the road yapping on their phone - texting their friends - doing everything but driving..
now just imagine.. your going down the road and EVERYONE - EVERYONE gets a message at the same time - and they all check their phones at the same time.. this could cause some serious accidents.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Did you not see the part in the summar about "It will be similar to the TV alerts in that the text messages will be geographically targeted"? I suspect that they'll broadcast messages to those phones that are within reception of a given cell tower, not for cell numbers mapped to addresses in a given area.
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.