The global war on terrorism and natural disasters here and abroad are forcing policymakers to rethink-and redesign-public warning systems that take advantage of wireless and other technologies used by billions of people around the world today. The undertaking involves a mix of technological, legal and public policy issues. In an exclusive interview with RCR Wireless News D.C. Bureau Chief Jeff Silva, Mark Wood, a former engineer at L.M. Ericsson and currently honorary secretary of the Cellular Emergency Alert Systems Association International, agreed to field questions from RCR Wireless News on the challenges and promise of wireless emergency-alert technology.
RCR: Mark, explain your role at CEASa International. What other hats do you wear in connection with emergency-alert modernization?
Wood: I am the Honorary Secretary of the International Cellular Emergency Alert Services Association. My role is to coordinate the efforts of the like-minded teams from all over the world, all of whom share the common vision of putting cell broadcasting to the service of public safety. We are a not-for-profit foundation with a mission to save lives.
In addition to this role I also serve on the Working Group on Emergency Telecommunications, run by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, as a technical adviser. My role there is to look ahead at the emerging mobile technologies and try to predict how they will behave in disasters, and how they can be put into the service of the Humanitarian Agenda. It was while studying with this group that I realized the importance of cell broadcasting. I also serve as contributing editor of the ITU Handbook on Emergency Telecommunications, and serve the British Red Cross as an Emergency IT & Telecom Project Officer, and recently served as a UN humanitarian telecommunications coordinator during the Iraq war. My day job is as a freelance consultant on emergency communications and cell broadcasting.
RCR: How do you think the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in United States and the 2004 Indonesian tsunami changed the way government policy-makers, industry and citizens view public warning?
Wood: There is no doubt in my mind that 9/11 and the tsunami changed everything in public warning. The International Red Cross says, “Disaster is hazard multiplied by vulnerability.” So you see that small changes in the vulnerability of people makes a big reduction in the scale of the effects of the disaster on people. To be forewarned is to be fore-armed, so warning is a very effective way to reduce vulnerability and thus disaster.
All over the world, governments, policy-makers and citizens groups are looking again at an area that used to be a “Cinderella” of emergency management. In this instant-information age, citizens expect timely and accurate information from the government. If the government doesn’t come forth with information, then people doubt if they are really still in charge and start to look for their own solutions. Unreasonable or not, citizens expect snappy instructions even when all communications have collapsed.
The tsunami showed us that the tsunami alarm warns a dozen scientists, but is unable to make the “last mile” trip to the guy on the beach who needs the information. And let’s not forget, he is the one who paid for the warning system. Voters can and do ruthlessly punish governments that give them tardy, inaccurate or useless information. This is a voting-booth issue and that’s why governments are revising their capabilities.
RCR: Mark, how would you characterize the state of emergency warning service in the United States and abroad? What developments and benchmarks do you see for 2006 and beyond?
Wood: Look, I know it’s fashionable to criticize American public-safety right now, but there are very few governments that can brag about something like EAS [Emergency Alert Service]. It’s true that the present warning systems would have been recognized by President Truman, but it’s always the case that investment follows citizen concerns, which is why Congress is discussing spending serious money on public warning in a more serious way than they have before.
Right now the state of the art is sirens, NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] radio, EAS and public-service announcements over broadcast radio and TV, sometimes using scrolling text. Sirens have short ranges, so they are a fairly expensive solution because you need lots of them to cover a town. They also don’t carry much information other than, “You should be more stressed than you are now.” I heard a siren going off in the earthquake- and tsunami-prone Kobe, Japan, one morning, and had no idea what to do next. On the plus side they are independent, reliable, robust-and you don’t need any fancy terminals to receive the warning, so they are socially flat. Citizens would then turn on the radio for more detailed instructions. Many hazard-prone states lavish loving care on their maintenance.
NOAA radio system is a very fine and well-engineered VHF radio network which can be applied to public warning. It brings authentic and detailed information to the public, but has the disadvantage that it can only reach those who have had the foresight to purchase a NOAA radio receiver, and turn it on. A further problem is that it is not usual for people to carry the radio around when they leave the house, unless they have an expectation of a severe event. Interestingly, the 1951 CONELRAD system was used to command broadcasters to switch off their stations, preventing enemy bombers from homing in-but also preventing the public from getting any information! The much-better 1963 Emergency Broadcast System [EBS] took the opposite approach and had a hierarchical structure of passing information to public broadcast stations from authenticated information providers such as the National Weather Service. It was further authenticated by a “10-bell alarm” system carried over UPI teletype networks. It was used some 20,000 times until superseded by the EAS service in 1997.
EAS uses a network of encoders and decoders putting the message in standard digital form called the SAME protocol, which can trigger broadcast stations’ decoders and thus create public warning messages, or have station announcers do that by voice or an inserted text box. You should know by the way that broadcasters are always very nervous about handing over their airwaves to anyone else and usually prefer to announce for themselves.
Radio and TV broadcasts can reach people wherever they are, and on very large mass scales. There is the ability to explain the situation at length, so broadcasters and, in particular, journalists will always have an important role in disaster mitigation. The problem is that with our present lifestyles we are not always watching TV and radio, so we need something more obtrusive to get us to go there for more information.
For example, I did not know about the London bombings (July 7, 2005) for three hours because I was working on my computer and not listening to the radio. The Red Cross could not reach me because the mobile-phone system was jammed, so I knew nothing until I phoned the police on an unrelated routine matter, only to be told that they were trying to get to me for hours. The United Kingdom has nothing like EAS, but does have something like EBS.
In 2004, the FCC published a notice of intended rulemaking prior to revising the EAS system. A new and more capable protocol called Common Alert Protocol is now being widely deployed. Money is being spent to include new digital terrestrial and satellite TV and radio stations into the mix. Some of these technologies will have geo specificity and alerting facilities, but many of the old drawbacks still apply.
RCR: How do wireless technologies fit into the mix? Could you briefly describe which wireless emergency-alert technologies are under consideration? And what are their advantages and drawbacks?
Wood: As one Houston sheriff put it, “You can’t hardly find anyone who doesn’t have a mobile phone these days.” There are billions of mobiles in use all over the world and we would be just plain negligent if we didn’t bend over backward to find a way to put all that power to the use of the humanitarian agenda. The citizen buys the phone at his expense, keeps it charged up and with him at all times.
The main bearers under consideration are SMS and cell broadcasting. SMS has the advantage of being carried on the control channels and not the traffic channels. During overloads, control channels have priority over traffic channels and so SMS messages have a much better chance of getting through than voice announcements.
Cell broadcasting has the advantage that it is carried on a separate control channel and is not affected by traffic channel congestion at all. In addition, it does not cause any congestion because it does not use traffic or control channels to work. Whereas SMS message delivery is preceded by a full call set-up procedure-which needs the help of the mobility management servers, GMSC [gateway mobile switching center], HLR [home location register], VLR [visitor location register], MSC [mobile switching center] and finally large BSC [base station controller] paging load-cell broadcasting does not create any demands on the system at all. Therefore, it can reach an unlimited number of subscribers in 20 seconds without causing the network to crash in its hour of stress.
Even better, no disaster manager wants millions running in panic, blocking the highways and running out of gas and water. Cell broadcasting can target specific towers or groups of towers, so you can tell this neighborhood to evacuate, but that neighborhood that it is safer to stay where they are for now.
Cell broadcast is, in my opinion, the “magic bullet” for the citizen, the emergency manager and the network; we would be nuts to miss this trick and we are not going to.
RCR: What needs fixing in emergency-alert systems other than technology?
Wood: It seems clear to me that no one delivery method will be the final one-size-fits-all solution. Rather, a whole range of different technologies will be needed in order to reach the population. There will need to be significant harmonization of at least the information-provider sources and authentication regimes. This is why CEASa is supporting the creation of the U.S. Trust Protocol Board, which will facilitate the interests of all the stakeholders in the proposed cell-broadcast solution. I am glad to say that some progress is being made on this matter, but we can’t afford to let turf wars break out and prevent progress.
RCR: What roles do government and industry play in emergency-alert reform? What are the biggest obstacles to improving emergency-alert options?
Wood: Since society chose to deregulate telecom, there are now two types of telecom companies: Those who ruthlessly keep their eyes on the bottom line, and those going out of business. I believe that we need to be respectful of this situation if we are to gain the trust of the networks. It also means that it is not fair to expect telecom businesses to take the lead in emergency information provision. Government, on the other hand, has both the mandate and the legal powers to provide information and demand action of citizens. We will need a government-to-citizen relationship working through telecom service providers, but each with its own needs.
CEASa is supportive of the set up of “Trust Protocol Boards,” which consist of a steering committee of stakeholders in this enterprise. Citizens need to know that they can trust the message to be authentic. Networks need to be sure that their customers won’t be driven off the network by spam, junk mail or hoax messages. Networks will also want to be compensated for the use the spectrum which is in their care. Governments will need to be sure that the system is working and has the capability that they require in an emergency. The Trust Protocol Board will facilitate MoUs [memorandums of understanding] and contracts that will satisfy all stakeholders. Importantly, there needs to be an independent watchdog that monitors the performance of the system and is able to report to the board if anything needs attention.
RCR: Einstein PCS, a GSM wireless unit of Airadigm Communications, successfully tested a cell-broadcast technology in 2004 and 2005 in Appleton, Wis. Appleton is expected to be part of a multi-city group that offers emergency warning function to subscribers in the near future. Do you believe Appleton, Wis., which is implementing a cell-broadcast alert system, will become a wireless emergency alert model for the rest of the United States? If so, how?
Wood: The Einstein network in Appleton, Wisconsin, has shown remarkable foresight and acute business acumen in this regard. I believe that cell broadcasting will be a success only if it is a commercial success. Information providers and networks and terminal makers will need to have the incentive to maintain and develop the feature. In fact there is considerable variation in the terminal behavior at the moment.
One of the problems with CB [Citizens Band] is that there is no call data record, so no billing. The best way to charge for the service is from the sender of the information. Therefore, we need to have middleware that can assess the load that the message has caused on the network, and convert that into charging. Now that we have done that, we can create a commercially sustainable program whereby commercial messaging compensates the network for use of their infrastructure.
We are interested in a win-win program where everyone gains added value in the chain.
