Mobile EAS Needs More Capabilities, Countries Say
GENEVA -- There’s little agreement about what capabilities and tools are needed for mobile alert broadcasting systems, among countries and standards bodies at this week’s meeting of an ITU-T study group. The U.S. in March floated a preliminary text defining service requirements, among proposals being considered this week. The U.K. wants 3GPP to reserve number resources to support the civil alerting. A draft recommendation on administering those resources will require agreement between countries.
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Studies show a positive correlation between better warning and reduced loss of life and property damage, the draft text said. Warning the public over mobile telephone networks in emergencies and disasters must consider people who are roaming from other countries, it said.
The U.K., Brazil and an Arab countries said the messages and their identifiers should support a number of languages, various types of messages and other characteristics. Brazil wants the draft to account for rules that may require messages in certain cases such as for national security. However, governments should decide whether to transmit international alert messages to the public, the Arab countries said.
Brazil also wanted the requirements to apply to International Mobile Telecommunications, the 3G and 4G technologies standardized in the ITU. The Arab countries want the messages to be based on GSM, UMTS and CDMA technologies. Participants in ITU-R working parties on the mobile service including 3G and 4G standards supported the study group’s work to define requirements for mobile alerting broadcast capabilities. Brazil said the study group’s work to identify requirements for an alerting broadcast service should continue if the 3GPP mechanisms aren’t sufficient for all administrations.
The U.K. reviewed identifiers allocated by 3GPP for broadcasting civil alerts by cellphones that raised a number of concerns. Egypt wants the study group to investigate a new mechanism for allocating and assigning message identifiers. The U.K. said the technology-neutral approach in a draft recommendation on administering and allocating multicast addresses for civic purposes is headed in the right direction. The recommendation describes a technology- and vendor-neutral generic proposal to use open standards for registry of point to multipoint, multicast and broadcast address space for civic purposes to warn the public at a government’s discretion.
The U.K. wants the ITU-T to ask 3GPP to reserve number resources to support messages for civil alert systems, it told the study group. That and other countries are in the early stages of deploying a civil alert system, it said. The Netherlands will launch a civil alert cell broadcast system in early 2010.
3GPP told the group it has a well-defined registration mechanism for broadcast message identifiers that’s used by the GSM Association and the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) for the commercial mobile alerting system. The 3GPP mechanism allows allocation of additional identifiers and categories for any use, including for emergency alerting and for civic purposes, it said.
ATIS and the Telecommunication Industry Association said they're seriously concerned about the ITU-T proposal to administer the allocation of identifiers for emergency alerting for civic purposes. A new and competing ITU-T mechanism will only result in confusion and inconsistency across the global industry, they said.