Emergency Alerts Via Mobile Phones

For a number of years the United States has had a system in place for times of national and regional emergency and disaster, allowing for information and warnings to be spread out to the wider populous.

First introduced in 1963 the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS) and from 1997 onwards the Emergency Alert System (EAS) has utilized all of the TV and radio frequencies in the US to broadcast warning messages to people in their homes, cars, anywhere they have access to a TV or radio.

The mobile phone company, Motorola, has recently applied for a patent on a new addition or improvement to the way the country will receive their warnings, a system that has the potential for World wide use.

“Unfortunately, a large portion of the intended recipients will not have their TV and radio systems turned on when a disaster occurs,” says Motorola engineer Jerome Vogedes in the patent filed on 21st May.

Motorola believe that the answer is a new generation of mobile/cellphones that are able to rapidly create a peer-to-peer (P2P) network when an emergency alert is broadcast. A phone at the edge of a disaster area, where a cellphone service is still available, receives the alert. It then contacts the nearest phone using Wi-Fi or other transfer methods to establish a P2P network and pass on the message to all active phones.

With the constant terrorist threat to the US and over the World, targeting of the infrastructure of the EAS could be a possibility, Motorola believe that the P2P warning message will get to the people with “minimal use of infrastructure”.