All cell phones have emergency alert capabilities. They don’t need a connection to the normal service tower, it uses any tower in the area that is available, and emergency broadcasts are put out and tested all the time. If you live in the USA, you’ll likely get one today at 2pm even…
You fundamentally misunderstand the technology. For push notifications and amber alerts and such to work, you need a personal 1:1 digital connection to a nearby cell tower. The range on that connection is not very far, and every alert needs to be sent individually.
An FM tower could broad-beam disaster information for tens of miles around with much simpler technology, out of one location on generator power. It is a far more reliable way to get information about a major disaster out to everybody simultaneously with far fewer infrastructure layers involved. No need to spool literally millions of alert pings out.
Also a continuous voice stream carries a lot more info than a damn push notification - obviously.
When COVID-19 started, the county health department where I was decided to repeatedly use it to blast non-updates. And in the US, unlike the Amber Alert stuff, the general alerting stuff cannot be disabled; that means that you’re trusting the party who can send alerts to not abuse it. When you consider that they were causing everyone in the metro area to stop whatever they were doing – meetings or whatever – and look at their phones for a message that said “stores are still closed, continue to social-distance”, it was incredibly obnoxious.
Honestly, I want the ability to at least disable county warnings. At least temporarily. So far, the federal government hasn’t use it other than for very infrequent tests, but county officials haven’t shown that restraint.
That being said, I suppose it could be worse. One major point of contention in Germany after the 2021 European floods that killed a bunch of people was that, even though they knew that they were going to have to flood the towns along the rivers, they didn’t have the emergency alerting thing set up, so they couldn’t notify people that they were about to be flooded and to get to high ground immediately.
It sounds like some emergency-handling people in Germany caught flak for that and that they went out and banged their alerting system into shape after that.
All cell phones have emergency alert capabilities. They don’t need a connection to the normal service tower, it uses any tower in the area that is available, and emergency broadcasts are put out and tested all the time. If you live in the USA, you’ll likely get one today at 2pm even…
You fundamentally misunderstand the technology. For push notifications and amber alerts and such to work, you need a personal 1:1 digital connection to a nearby cell tower. The range on that connection is not very far, and every alert needs to be sent individually.
An FM tower could broad-beam disaster information for tens of miles around with much simpler technology, out of one location on generator power. It is a far more reliable way to get information about a major disaster out to everybody simultaneously with far fewer infrastructure layers involved. No need to spool literally millions of alert pings out.
Also a continuous voice stream carries a lot more info than a damn push notification - obviously.
The alerting system in the US can broadcast them.
The emergency alert system isn’t meant for informational updates.
Using it to broadcast updates on when power is going to be restored isn’t what it’s meant for
It’s granular. It CAN be used for that. It’s used for Amber alerts already. Easy enough to make additional categories.
Here in Canada it isn’t granular, every alert is sent at the “presidential” level
When COVID-19 started, the county health department where I was decided to repeatedly use it to blast non-updates. And in the US, unlike the Amber Alert stuff, the general alerting stuff cannot be disabled; that means that you’re trusting the party who can send alerts to not abuse it. When you consider that they were causing everyone in the metro area to stop whatever they were doing – meetings or whatever – and look at their phones for a message that said “stores are still closed, continue to social-distance”, it was incredibly obnoxious.
Honestly, I want the ability to at least disable county warnings. At least temporarily. So far, the federal government hasn’t use it other than for very infrequent tests, but county officials haven’t shown that restraint.
That being said, I suppose it could be worse. One major point of contention in Germany after the 2021 European floods that killed a bunch of people was that, even though they knew that they were going to have to flood the towns along the rivers, they didn’t have the emergency alerting thing set up, so they couldn’t notify people that they were about to be flooded and to get to high ground immediately.
It sounds like some emergency-handling people in Germany caught flak for that and that they went out and banged their alerting system into shape after that.
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/germany-to-warn-of-future-floods-with-mobile-phone-alerts-2495503
https://www.thelocal.de/20221206/all-cell-phone-users-in-germany-to-be-part-of-disaster-warning-day
That being said, we also had that bogus Hawaii ballistic missile alert, which wasn’t great.