France will finally deploy a population alert system, based on cell broadcasting, already adopted in many countries.
It was long awaited in France. After various attempts, such as SAIP to fight/prevent terrorism, and many failures, the government has just implemented several alert technologies, including cellbroadcast, in France.
Cell Broadcast in France
If you have traveled abroad, you may have already received a message of this type, for example for a natural disaster. Most countries use what is called broadcast SMS. We have already mentioned this procedure, which is called Cell Broadcast. This technology uses the GSM network (which covers 99.9% of French territory) to broadcast messages (composed of blocks of up to 93 characters, with the possibility of concatenating 15 blocks) on all mobile phones and smartphones in an area given geography.
FR-Alert is based on cell broadcasting (Cell Broadcast) by telecommunication antennas, but also geolocated SMS (LB-SMS or Location-Based SMS). This latest technology will be deployed later, it will also reach phones that are not 4G compatible.
An alert sent for any type of major incident
In a press release, the Ministry of the Interior quotes “tany type of major event justifying alerting the population concerned for safety”. This includes natural disasters (flood, storm and cyclone, fire, tsunami, volcanic eruption), biological and chemical accidents (pollution, gas leak, nuclear incident), health (epidemic, pandemic, agri-food incident), technological and industrial ( breakdown of telecommunications, serious accidents on road, rail or air networks, industrial incident), a serious public security event or an act of a terrorist nature.
? A few weeks before the arrival of #EN_Alert and cellbroadcast in France, find our article dedicated to relaying the alert on social networks ? and the role of #MSGU.
Good reading ! https://t.co/poBzJ5NXNu— VISOV | #MSGU (@VISOV1) June 6, 2022
The system was designed by researchers, everything was studied including sounds, message length, words or geographic information. Some results show that in the event of a threat, some people want to receive short messages for immediate sheltering, whereas in the event of danger they wish to have as much information as possible (the starting point of the event, the affected area, instructions). These alerts will be transmitted even if your phone is in silent mode. Only airplane mode blocks these types of notifications.
The full deployment will not arrive until the end of June, after several weeks of testing. It is a European directive that forced France to have such a system before June 21, 2022. Let’s hope that this system is more efficient than SAIP. Used during the attacks in Nice, the project was abandoned because it suffered major malfunctioning problems.
France is lagging behind in Cell Broadcast. Countries like Israel, Chile, Japan, Sri Lanka and the United States have been using it for several years. New York City too. On the Old Continent, it has been operational in Lithuania, Greece and the Netherlands for some time as well. It arrived more recently in Italy. There are other examples elsewhere in the world.
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