Alert System Coming to Your Cell Phone Soon

FCC�s Emergency Alert System Coming to Your Cell Phone Soon




August 25, 2004
Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com

The old Cold-War era broadcasts � with the shrieking signal on your TV and radio � may be finding new life in the post 9/11 era.

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In fact, Emergency Alerts may become as ubiquitous as your cell phones and wireless devices, if the FCC has their way.

This worries me, on 9-11 the phone grid was overloaded and cell phones were useless.
link to this article is here, john

www.newsmax.com...

Originally posted by SIRR1
This worries me, on 9-11 the phone grid was overloaded and cell phones were useless.

yeah, that was the first thing that came to my mind. it seems like a great way to overload the systems.

not to mention, what if there was a blackout again, but caused by terrorists? wouldn't that sort of render these things useless, since there would be no power for the towers?

And here I thought it would never happen, but this sure looks like a marriage between fear and spam. Just what I need, sms messages about how the world is coming to an end, every day of the week, no matter where I am. Is something like this really necessary, it seems were pretty well jacked up on fear most of the time anyway thanks to the constant bulletins, warnings, colors and all that crap on the TV. Seems leaving well-enough alone isint part of the goverment's vocabulary.

Originally posted by cmdrkeenkid
not to mention, what if there was a blackout again, but caused by terrorists? wouldn't that sort of render these things useless, since there would be no power for the towers?

Cell phone towers, and telephone central offices have battery backup, and some use genreators that will kick in automatically. At the most, an electrically outage will only be a blip in service ability.

The real problem with this is overloading the available circuits. But not even so much from the broadcast of the alert. Our system is able to send blanket alerts, text message, to all phones on our system simultaneously without chewing up bandwidth.
The problem will come one everyone calls the loved ones to ask, "Hey, did you just get a wierd text message?"

You know, it would be kind of creepy if you were out in a public place and everyones cell phone and pagers started to ring with a National Alert!

john

Originally posted by SIRR1
You know, it would be kind of creepy if you were out in a public place and everyones cell phone and pagers started to ring with a National Alert!

john

It is. Yesterday, everyone at work, and we all have company provided phones, got a text message to go and update our PRLs. A bunch of us were standing around, and they all went off. That was wierd. It would be spooky, creepy, wierd, if it occured because of a national emergency.