After years of delay, Austria is getting a system for official alarms on cell phones. Starting this summer, warnings of disasters, search calls for missing children and similar urgent messages will be sent to cell phones free of charge using cell broadcast. This was already planned for 2019.
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Germany activated Cell Broadcast on February 23, 2023 and has been using it intensively since then – in the first year there were no fewer than 219 alarms in Germany. In the USA, official emergency notifications have been distributed to cell phones since 2012. In Tanzania, Cell Broadcast was introduced in 2008 to display discounts on mobile phone tariffs based on current network usage. The system was first publicly demonstrated in 1997. It sends broadcast-like messages to all compatible smartphones that are registered in a radio cell, regardless of their phone number – hence the name Cell Broadcast. However, not every cell phone displays the notifications automatically. Depending on the model, the user must make appropriate settings in advance.
In the event of a disaster in Germany, warnings are issued by the situation centers of the federal states as well as the control centers of the districts and independent cities. In Austria, ten senders are planned: the Ministry of the Interior and the state warning centers of the nine federal states, which are also responsible for civil protection.
Software updates for common smartphones that have been available since Wednesday are intended to ensure that they also receive and display the warning messages. Digital State Secretary Florian Tursky (ÖVP) is therefore calling on Austrians to install the updates. He cannot yet give an exact date for the commissioning of Cell Broadcast, but at least it should be in the summer.
Years of delay
It is no glory for Tursky's party that Austria will not receive its warning system until 2024. The Austrian People's Party has ruled Austria with changing coalition partners since the beginning of 1987 – interrupted only by a civil servant government that had to temporarily run the office for seven months in 2019 after an ÖVP-FPÖ government collapsed in a corruption scandal (“Ibiza”). The once responsible transport minister, Norbert Hofer (FPÖ), announced the implementation for 2019, but did not issue any ordinance regulating the technical implementation. A new Austrian telecommunications law then stipulated the introduction by June 21, 2022 at the latest, and an EU regulation set September 21, 2022 as the latest date.
All deadlines passed. The necessary regulation to implement disaster protection with cell broadcast in Austria only came about a year ago. It determined which technical parameters the mobile phone operators had to agree on with the Interior Ministry and state warning centers and which protocol would be used.
The technical parameters
The regulation requires that every Austrian mobile operator operate two independent broadcast facilities (Cell Broadcast Center, CBC). Technically, Austria relies on the Common Alerting Protocol CAP 1.2 from OASIS in the AT-Alert form. AT-Alert omits many optional parameters to keep the system simple. The target area of a broadcast must be defined in a maximum of ten polygons, which may have a maximum of one hundred geographical coordinates in total. The network operators then select the appropriate mobile phone cells – which can of course differ from network to network. In the peripheral area of a warning area, it is possible that cell phones registered in one network display a warning, but phones registered in another network do not.
The messages must be formatted in UTF-8 and can be up to 4096 characters long. The languages defined are “German” and “Other”. The warnings are sent out repeatedly, every minute to ten minutes, depending on the urgency. The repetitions are used to reach devices that were not logged in in previous attempts. A unique identification number ensures that a cell phone does not display the same warning message a second time, even if it has changed cell phone networks.
There are no multimedia elements because sending them in bulk could overload the networks. Hyperlinks could theoretically be included in the text, but their use is controversial: if tens of thousands of recipients click on the link to a website or a telephone number at the same time, the network could begin to falter again.
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