The Brilliant Cell Phone Security Feature That We Still Don't Have.
via TechnologyReview.Com...
"Cell broadcast" technology is a largely dormant part of many cell-phone network standards.
Japanese who carry phones serviced by NTT Docomo, Japan's dominant cell phone carrier, can opt to have alerts about earthquakes pushed directly to their phones. The technology that makes this possible, the Area Mail Disaster Information Service, is designed to deliver detailed alerts as quickly as possible.
This service is uniquely enabled by a little-known technology known as Cell Broadcast, or SMS-CB. It's totally unlike traditional, point-to-point SMS, in that it can be broadcast directly from cell towers to every phone in range and does not use more bandwidth when sent to more users. In this way it's just like a over-the-air television or radio, where bandwidth requirements do not increase as more users receive a signal.
This is extremely important in the event of a disaster: According to Israeli SMS-CB company eViglio, cell broadcast has the potential to reach millions of users in seconds in an inherently geo-targeted fashion, whereas trying to reach the same number of users via traditional SMS would swamp the network, slowing the delivery of messages to a crawl.
Tsunami Alerts Not Yet Implemented
It appears that Japan's Area Mail Disaster Information Service has not yet been equipped to warn of tsunamis. The abstract of an eerily prescient paper from 2009, "A Proposal of Tsunami Warning System Using Area Mail Disaster Information Service on Mobile Phones" opens with the line:
The earthquake with the seismic center around the coast of Miyagi prefecture and the oceanic trench of southern Sanriku is expected to occur with high probability. [...] Consequently, a system is required that prefectures, cities, towns and villages collect swiftly and accurately the tsunami monitoring information that is necessary for evacuation behavior, relief and recovery activities, and deliver and share to the local residents.
Sendai, the city most profoundly devastated by last week's tsunami, is in Miyagi prefecture -- the same one mentioned in the abstract... (more)
Japanese who carry phones serviced by NTT Docomo, Japan's dominant cell phone carrier, can opt to have alerts about earthquakes pushed directly to their phones. The technology that makes this possible, the Area Mail Disaster Information Service, is designed to deliver detailed alerts as quickly as possible.
This is extremely important in the event of a disaster: According to Israeli SMS-CB company eViglio, cell broadcast has the potential to reach millions of users in seconds in an inherently geo-targeted fashion, whereas trying to reach the same number of users via traditional SMS would swamp the network, slowing the delivery of messages to a crawl.
Tsunami Alerts Not Yet Implemented
It appears that Japan's Area Mail Disaster Information Service has not yet been equipped to warn of tsunamis. The abstract of an eerily prescient paper from 2009, "A Proposal of Tsunami Warning System Using Area Mail Disaster Information Service on Mobile Phones" opens with the line:
The earthquake with the seismic center around the coast of Miyagi prefecture and the oceanic trench of southern Sanriku is expected to occur with high probability. [...] Consequently, a system is required that prefectures, cities, towns and villages collect swiftly and accurately the tsunami monitoring information that is necessary for evacuation behavior, relief and recovery activities, and deliver and share to the local residents.
Sendai, the city most profoundly devastated by last week's tsunami, is in Miyagi prefecture -- the same one mentioned in the abstract... (more)
So why don't we have it in the United States yet?
Tom Fahey of a company called CellCast Technologies... tells us that the United States is moving toward this capability with the system scheduled to go live in April of next year. This is after President Bush approved the plan in 2006. Fahey says that it has taken that long for wireless carriers to agree upon and implement a set of standards to make this happen. (more) (FCC Fact Sheet)
All right, who muttered "negligence".
