“The 20th century has seen the passage from the tocsin to the siren, the 21st century will be that of the passage from the siren to the mobile phone”, affirmed Gérald Darmanin – already Minister of the Interior – in September 2020 to announce the upcoming launch of a new type of public alert system. Based on Cell broadcast, a broadcast technology on cellular networks and on the sending of geolocated SMS, this device was, 18 months after the Minister’s intervention, still in the experimental phase.
Called “FR-Alert”, it will finally be deployed on a large scale from the end of June, in mainland France and overseas, as Place Beauvau recently indicated. This new alert system should allow the authorities to send a notification to all people present in a specific area in the event of a serious event, without having to go through an application or sending an SMS message. The device, already widely used in the United States and Japan, has been the subject of a State investment of around 50 million euros.
It should make people forget the resounding failure of the “Population Alert and Information System” (SAIP) application, launched in the wake of the Paris attacks. Taxed for its lack of responsiveness (especially during the Nice attack), the application had not aroused the enthusiasm of the general public, before being put away by the public authorities in 2018. FR-Alert does not will require for its part no download and will have the advantage of targeting the smartphones of people located in a specific region, provided that they are connected to the cellular network of the operators.
Large-scale tests to come
Between now and its launch, the device should still be subject to various tests in real conditions. So don’t be surprised if you receive a notification, says the Ministry of the Interior. “Between now and the national deployment, several Civil Security and Public Security exercises are organized during which the sending of the alert notification will be tested. If you are in one of the areas determined by the scenario of the exercises , you will be able to receive a notification accompanied by a specific sound signal, even if your mobile phone is in silent mode.
Place Beauvau indicates that the notifications transmitted within the framework of the system may include a summary of the nature of the risk, the identity of its issuer, the location of the danger, the attitude to adopt to protect oneself and links containing additional information. on the current event. The alerts will be transmitted via the 4G (then 5G) networks of the operators, while the geolocated SMS will be communicated in the traditional way via the traditional 2G, 3G, 4G networks.
The authorities specify that they will not have “access to the geolocation of mobile phones since this technology is based on the sending of the alert via the relay antennas of the telephone operators”.