Public safety has concerns about carrier reluctance to road test ...

national alerting system, carriers and equipment makers said they opposed sending test messages to subscribers. TIA reiterated its concerns in a statement last week. Art Botterell,, manager, Community Warning System, with the Contra Costa County, Calif., Sheriff’s Office, and a member of the advisory committee, said carriers expressed anxiety about testing during meetings of the group. “Nobody really knows what the public reaction to cellular alerts will be, in particular, how many secondary phone calls will be stimulated, and, of course, how many of those will be to 911,” Botterell told us. “It makes sense to move carefully into this new territory and a lot of the necessary reliability testing can be done behind the scenes in the system without actually putting test alerts on the public’s cellphones,” he said. “But at some point we're going to need the ability to do at least limited public testing, or else the first time we use the system for a real emergency it'll be a gigantic social and technological experiment.” FCC sources said the testing issue has yet to receive substantial attention among commissioners. TIA wants to work with public safety to develop some way to test alerts to cellphones, Patrick Sullivan, its director of technical and governmental affairs, said Tuesday. “If there are proposals that are out there that don’t strain the networks and don’t confuse cellphone users, we'd like to hear about that,” he said. He said carriers believe tests can be conducted between the alert initiator and aggregator/gateway, but they have concerns about testing similar to that conducted by broadcasters. “This would be a brand new dynamic where the public probably would not be as educated about the likelihood of receiving test messages [from wireless carriers] as they are about broadcast messages,” Sullivan said.