Calif. plans statewide wireless alert system

California announced plans to develop and launch a statewide emergency cellphone alert system within 12 to 14 months. The move is definitely apropos for “the Golden State,” which has long prided itself on being a leap ahead of other states and the federal status quo for public safety.
While the rest of the country waits for the Federal Communications Commission to upgrade the existing nationwide emergency alert system, which dates back to the Cold War, California is moving forward on its own. Congress passed the WARN Act last year that calls for a nationwide cellular alert system. A panel is expected to have its recommendations for the system around the summer of 2008.
Today’s nationwide system relies primarily on television, radio and cable TV, all of which are increasingly competing with wireless forms of entertainment and communication enabled by mobile devices. Hence, policy-makers want to make sure the new system will be flexible enough to move forward with future innovation in the industry.
“You can’t discount the speed with which the industry innovates,” said Joe Farren, spokesman for CTIA. “You don’t want to just rush into something that’s going to be obsolete 12 to 15 months down the road.”
The state’s Emergency Council is now meeting with representatives from the Public Utilities Commission, state homeland security and wireless carriers to finalize the operation. Carriers will play a major role in the service as each would be responsible for automatically broadcasting the warning to their relevant customers. Yet, they too would prefer to work collaboratively with their competitors and legislators on a national plan.
“It goes way beyond us, and it really is an industry issue,” AT&T Mobility spokesman Mark Siegel said. “It’s something that all carriers have to deal with.”
Tower operators and owners will also have to collaborate with state officials to help resolve technical issues, ensuring that the system accurately targets a message’s delivery based on geographic proximity to the threat.
While it’s not opposed to California’s plan, CTIA believes the best way to approach a program like this is on a national level. “Our business is a national business,” Farren said. “It gets very confusing if carriers have to try to comply with 50 different rules in 50 different states . let’s only regulate where we have to first and foremost.”
States like California, however, say they’re not willing to wait for the federal government.
“If history is an indicator, the federal government will not act as quickly as we can in California,” Lt. Gov. John Garamendi told lawmakers when he announced the plan in Sacramento, according to local media reports.
The plan being pushed through by the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services would alert cellphone subscribers to earthquake aftermaths, wildfires, floods, tsunamis, toxic spills and other major threats to public safety.
Garamendi said the system would target users based on the cell towers their device accesses during an incident. Officials say this approach would allow the state to pinpoint people’s approximate location and inform them of things as limited in scope as food poisoning at a nearby restaurant.
The new cell-alert system would be a complement to other public warning tools, including the Emergency Broadcast System, National Weather Service bulletins and the Amber Alert System.
The system will alert cellphone users with a unique sound, followed by text and/or voice messages with information about the threat and instructions on how to proceed.
The state will also have to harness technology that puts disabled persons and non-English speakers on an equal playing field, with one option being unique vibrating alerts for deaf users and voice messages for blind users.
Officials also made a point to try to quell citizens’ privacy concerns by explaining that the system essentially sends out a mass message to all the cellphones that have been served by a specific communications relay tower near a danger zone, regardless of who owns the phone.