History and Importance of Cell Broadcast

By nature, all radio systems are multi point to multi point systems, unless you force them not to be so, by adding elaborate protocols. Cellular phone networks are radio networks and are therefore naturally suited to Broadcasting.

Back in 1897 Guglielmo Marconi called his invention the “Wireless Telegraph”, because he wanted his customers to visualize the use to which the system would be put. In order to make radio behave like a telegraph network, Marconi had to introduce a regime of call signs and traffic procedures to control the flow of traffic. As far as any sender of a telegram was concerned, the telegram was delivered from point to point, so the illusion was complete.

Nevertheless the fact remains that signals are broadcast from a base station, but reception is intentionally limited by means of protocols resident in the terminal (the phone). A simple change in those protocols would enable any terminal to pick up Broadcasts from any base station.

This point was not lost on the ETSI’s GSM committee, (who, 100 years after the invention of radio) added a feature called ‘Cell Broadcast’ to the GSM standard. This is contained in standards GSM 03.49 and others. Technologically this was successful and had been demonstrated in Paris by 1997. By now all GSM phones and base stations have the feature latent within them, though sometimes it is not enabled in the network.

There are four important points to recall about the use of Cell Broadcasting for emergency purposes.
1: It is already resident in most network infrastructure and in the phones, so there is no need to build any towers, lay any cable, or write any software or replace terminals.
2: It is not affected by traffic load; therefore it will be of use during a disaster, when load spikes tend to crash networks, as the London bombings 7/7 showed. Also it does not cause any significant load of its own, so would not add to the problem.
3: It is geo scalable, so a message can reach hundreds of millions of people across continents within a minute.
4 It is geo specific, so that government disaster managers can avoid panic and road jamming, by telling each neighborhood specifically, if they should evacuate or stay put.

In short, it is such a powerful national security asset, that it would be inexcusable not to seize the chance to put an existing technology, to the benefit of the safety of citizen.

Abstract from: Mark Wood, Hon. CTA CEASa.

Cell Broadcast in Sri Lanka

SRI LANKA: November 15, 2005_COLOMBO - Next time a disaster such as a tsunami strikes Sri Lanka, officials say they hope to use text messages and the mobile phone system to give people the crucial few minutes warning they need to seek safety. The Dec. 26 tsunami struck Sri Lanka hours after it hit Thailand, but no warning was issued and even if it had been, many poor villagers would not have heard it. Within weeks, mobile phone operator Dialog Telekom says it was working on ways to solve the problem.
"If we go back to Dec. 26, many lessons were learnt," Dialog chief executive Hans Wijayasuriya said at the launch of the mobile phone-based warning system on Monday. "You can convert a mobile phone into a powerful alarm device." The scheme will be launched first as a pilot project in parts on the island's south coast, much of which was devastated by the giant wave that killed nearly 40,000 Sri Lankans. It will use text messages to alert police officers, village chiefs and other important officials to warnings, and can also send a blanket message to all phones in an area through "cell broadcasting" -- more versatile than a normal text or phone call.
"What usually happens in a disaster is that the network is overloaded and calls don't get through," Dialog research and development manager Ravi Abeysekera told Reuters. "That isn't a problem with cell broadcasting." The system could be running island-wide by the middle of 2006, he said. In the aftermath of the disaster, Sri Lankan officials put up "tsunami zone" signs in some coastal areas advising residents of the best route to higher ground. Holland had developed a similar disaster warning system, Abeysekera said, but the technology was still in its infancy. Some 3.5 million of Sri Lanka's 19 million people have a mobile phone, but to reach a wider number the system will also use alarms linked to the mobile phone network that will trigger sirens or bells in police stations, churches and temples in the event of an alert. Government officials will control the alert system from the capital Colombo. "There is no possibility for any misuse by anybody who wants to create panic and have a field day looting everywhere," said Tilak Ranavirajah, secretary to the Minister of Public Security, Law and Order. REUTERS NEWS SERVICE

Dutch test (CB)SMS disaster alarm

Correspondents in The Hague
OCTOBER 06, 2005

The Dutch Government started testing a special warning system that will send text messages to mobile phones to alert the population in the event of a disaster.

The technology for the system, called 'cell broadcast', allows the authorities to send text messages to mobile phone users in a specific area. The first tests recently started in Zoetermeer, a town in the west central Netherlands.

"The advantage of this system is that it allows us to send messages without having to know the phone numbers of the users in the region. Instead of sending a message to a specific known mobile phone you can send a text to all mobile phones in a specific zone," Frank Wassenaar of the Dutch interior ministry said.

The mobile phone broadcast system will be used in addition to the other warning systems in place to be used if disaster strikes, such as sirens and special emergency broadcasts on radio and television.

The project is a joint effort of the Dutch ministries of health, transport and economic affairs. The ministries will pay some 2.5 million euros (three million dollars) to use the cell broadcast technology over the next two years.

The government is working with mobile phone operators KPN, Vodafone and Telfort, which cover some 85 per cent of all Dutch mobile phone owners.

In the future tests with the system are planned in the Dutch capital Amsterdam and the south-western province of Zeeland

Agence France-Presse