WASHINGTON-The Clinton administration’s top telecom adviser last week urged the mobile-phone industry and other high-tech sectors to follow the lead of a Colorado firm that has developed a way to alert Internet users of violent weather and other local emergencies.
“The prototype is a wonderful example of an industry group and one of its members rising to the occasion and helping to fulfill its public responsibilities by putting technology to work. We encourage other industries to take a similar proactive approach to using their technologies to help people,” said Gregory Rohde, head of the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
Front Range Internet, based in Fort Collins, Colo., has devised a pop-up screen that appears with local weather warnings from the National Weather Service. As long as a user begins on the Front Range Web site, the emergency alert pop-screen will appear wherever the user surfs.
“We would still like to see the cell-phone industry rise to this challenge,” said Rohde. Rohde said he favors voluntary compliance, rather than legislation, to improve disaster warnings in the United States.
The mobile-phone industry, despite having a cell-broadcast standard in place and touting public-safety benefits of wireless devices, does not make emergency-alert services available to most of the nation’s 104 million subscribers.
Rohde’s remarks and Front Range Internet’s announcement follow last week’s report in RCR Wireless News that a long-awaited White House report advocating wireless and other technologies for disaster warnings is unlikely to be released until after Tuesday’s presidential and congressional elections.
Because the White House has not issued the report three years after its completion by a blue-ribbon panel and because Vice President Gore is surrounded by campaign advisers who double as telecom lobbyists, some have questioned whether the report’s delay is politically motivated.
Gore sat on the National Science and Technology Council that helped oversee the White House report.
A Gore spokesman declined to comment on the RCR story. The Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association said it has not lobbied the White House on the disaster warnings report.
“Widespread ISP involvement in this initiative could protect property, reduce costs and most importantly, save lives,” said Cronan O’Connell, executive director of the ISP Business Forum. The mobile-phone industry is in the midst of a transitional shift from voice to data as wireless and Internet technologies converge.
In addition to the thousands of people who are killed and injured by violent weather and other disasters each year, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy estimates that natural disasters between 1992 and 1996 cost the United States about $1 billion a week.
“There are many new technologies that provide the chance not only to reach just the people at risk, but also to personalize the message to their particular situation. … The opportunities are available right now to reduce significantly the loss of life and economic hardship if we simply become better coordinated,” states a copy of the White House report obtained by RCR.
David Solomon, who oversees enforcement of the Emergency Alert Service at the Federal Communications Commission, said the agency is on record as saying wireless technologies could play an important role in next-generation early warning systems.
