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Cell Broadcasting, its about time!
By Mark Wood, Hon Sec, International Civil Emergency Alert Service Association (CEASa)
Its two o clock in the morning at the Police Incident Handling center. A flash flood has placed a large town in danger. People need to get out fast. How will I wake them up and tell them what to do in less than a minute? I don’t want the people in the neighboring town to evacuate or it will block the road, how do I give them a different reassurance message? How do I do all that without jamming all the lines?
It is possible right now, many governments all over the world are taking a good hard look at Cell Broadcasting and they like what they see, there is now a lot of technical and diplomatic work going on to harmonize it so that it can become a powerful public safety tool without being vulnerable to hackers and spammers and cyber terrorists.
There are four important points that you should know.
• Cell Broadcasting (alias Area information) already exists in the mobile phones and base stations that we have today, there is no need to develop it or even to upgrade any part of the system. It allows the base station to stream a text message to all mobiles at the same time, provided subscribers have the feature switched on in their phone.
• It works even if the system is in full congestion, and even if the mobility management system and control links have crashed to do overload. It itself doesn’t make the situation worse by adding any load to the call set up system. This means it will work when you need it. It takes about 20 seconds to reach about 80% of participating citizens.
• You can select cells individually or group them, so that you can reach limitless millions at once, or select to tell this neighborhood to evacuate and that one to stay indoors off the roads. You do this by clicking on a map on your screen.
• It is possible to prevent unauthorized access to cell broadcast so that spammers, hackers or cyber terrorists cannot bombard citizens with spam, or set a bogus message off mischievously causing panic.
Clearly this is a very important new tool for public safety, but there is still some harmonization work to be done as the first systems are being rolled out. Accordingly there are meetings on going at the UN ITU, EU PSC, and the US government to investigate how to implement all this. In the next article I will explain what has to be done and how.
