Do Your Employees’ Phones Support Emergency Alerts
Recently there have been alerts where the number of people who received alerts was vastly larger than optimal. In one case here, instead of notifying a few hundred people, 750,000 people were alerted, including some who were more than 50 miles away from the target area.
Some of these were due to system malfunctions/design limitations, but others are due to the recipient’s phone capabilities.
A decade ago the feds launched the Wireless Emergency Alert system or WEA. There are 3 generations of this system, creatively named 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0.
Unlike your phone’s operating system, the WEA capability of your phone is baked into the phone before it comes off the assembly line. Once it is placed into the box in the factory, it can never be changed.
The newest phones can filter the WEA alerts they receive – down to 500 feet. Older phones blast your eardrums if the receive it. That means, if the older phone is within the radio range of a cell tower that is broadcasting the alert, it will alert you.
Emergency managers want the FCC to fix things. One estimate is that around half of active smartphones are WEA 3.0 compatible. The rest are not and all “flip phones” are not compatible.
The emergency managers want the FCC to figure out how to upgrade these older phones OR incentivize owners of old phones to upgrade. Upgrades are important because phone makers are having a hard time convincing users to buy new phones because the new features are minimal.
There is no way for the user to look at something on their phone to see what version, if any, it supports.
Also, if your phone has location services turned off, as many people do, even if the phone supports WEA 3.0, the ability for the WEA firmware to accurately know its location and therefore be able to figure out whether it should alert you is diminished. This works both ways meaning that you might not get an alert that you should or you might get an alert that you should not get.
The only way to find out whether your phone supports a particular version of WEA is to contact your carrier.
While this system is not perfect, it is the best we have at the federal level. Many cities and counties have implemented their own voluntary opt-in solution as a result. Those solutions require people to register in the county that they to receive alerts for. This has nothing to do with your current location, meaning if, for example, you work in a different city than you live in, you might not get the alerts you should. Some of these systems allow you to create separate accounts in different alert systems, but people have to understand that this is important and figure out how to do it. You also may want to get alerts for an elderly family member, for example, so this can get pretty complicated.
Credit: 9News Denver and here
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