Commercial Mobile Alert System Still on Target for April Launch
The Department of Homeland Security faces a “very tough” challenge to do all the necessary groundwork to meet an April deadline for the launch of a federal Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS) allowing wireless carriers to send warning messages to their subscribers, said Denis Gusty of the Department of Homeland Security’s Science & Technology Directorate during a webinar Wednesday sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Warning, Alert, and Response Network (WARN) Act enacted in 2006 mandated the launch of the warning network by that date.
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Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile participated in a regional test of the system in New York City last month. Gusty did not say when an expected test in the Washington area might take place. DHS’s goal had been to hold four regional tests this year in various parts of the country, Gusty said. Carriers are expected to roll out the service to different areas at different times in a “phased” roll out, he said.
"CMAS is supposed to be in operation by April 2012 -- that’s four months away,” Gusty said. “We were thinking about doing one more regional test and a national test before that date. That’s all I know right now. We are still planning this. It’s going to be tight. I'm not sure how we'll be able to pull this off, the timing of all this is very intense, I would say.” Gusty said two lessons learned so far are that any messages transmitted as part of a network test should be “clearly marked” as test messages and that a strong public outreach campaign is important. Officials in New York mounted a public relations campaign before the December test, which appeared to pay off, he said.
Research to date indicates most subscribers probably won’t “opt out” from receiving emergency alerts sent to their wireless devices, Gusty said. “However what we don’t know is how people react to this abbreviated, 90-character message,” he said. “That’s an area of research that still needs to be focused on.” The New York test made clear that people were only getting test messages, he noted. “We weren’t really looking into the length of the messages and how people were responding.”
Wireless alerts are “a bell ringer service that gets peoples’ attention to let them know that something bad is happening close to them,” said Mark Lucero with FEMA, who also spoke during the webinar: “It’s not intended to replace reverse 911 systems. … These reverse-call systems really have capabilities that CMAS does not have.” Lucero said FEMA is committed to making CMAS work.