Talk:EU-Alert

Contested deletion

This page should not be speedy deleted as an unambiguous copyright infringement, because the standarisation document for EU-ALERT that is reference to is made by the ETSI, The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is an independent, not-for-profit, standardization organization in the telecommunications industry (equipment makers and network operators) in Europe, headquartered in Sophia-Antipolis, France, with worldwide projection. ETSI produces globally-applicable standards for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), including fixed, mobile, radio, converged, broadcast and internet technologies.

However we are willing to remove the reference to the ETSI document

DISPUTED CONTENT: Location Based SMS

There are many inaccurate statements on this page related to Location Based SMS. For more information on Location Based SMS see here

The use of Location Based SMS as an emergency notification service instead of Cell Broadcast is not advised[9] by industry experts.

This is blatantly wrong. Unless there is a source/quote for these “industry experts” the entire sentence should be removed.

==> Source and quotes from industry experts have been added. There is no standard defined for location based SMS for public warning this is also done for a reason by the telecom experts and the reason is that location based SMS in crisis situations does not work

Location based SMS message delivery is not guaranteed

Neither is any other technology, but Location based SMS has proven to be more reliable (reaching close to 100% of phones) than any other technology.

==> It has been concluded that especially in crisis situations when everybody is dialing, using data, sending messages to family and loved ones SMS and Voice delivery are unreliable that is why countries with a very large experience with disasters like New Zealand, Japan, USA, Chile, Netherlands, Taiwan, Greece are using Cell Broadcast.

....and the implementations provide no mechanism through which a sender can determine whether an SMS message has been delivered in a timely manner

Yes it does. With SMS, the gets a delivery receipt for each SMS sent – thus providing real time statistics on how many have actually received the message on their phone. In contrast, Cell Broadcast is one-way without any feedback, relying on manual polls after the incidents to measure how many received it.

==>SMS delivery notification is indeed a feature, the issue is here that SMS delivery notification is an extra message increasing the congestion and more over it has an extra cost. We will update this statement

.....especially when network congestion occurs at the time of an emergency [10].

Network congestion when sending SMS was a major issue 10 years ago. Mobile networks today have much better (and improving) capacity.

==> unfortunately network congestion is still a very large issue for SMS and Voice calls especially when voice calls and SMS messages are to be delivered in a small geo-fenced area (e.g. a city) one has the limitation of the number of cell sites. People in the target area are trying to reach their family and loved ones and in the mean time the public warning authorities are trying to reach the people inside the geo-targeted area this is the recipe for network congestion

Based upon last years experience the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency concluded in a recent report [11] that in case of serious events it's extremely unlikely that Public Warning Messages via SMS will work and will be delivered in a timely manner (less than 1 minute).

The Swedish report is from 2017 and does not include location based SMS. The UMS LBAS system for VMA was launched after this report was written. Referring to this as a “recent” report and “last year” is blatantly wrong and deliberately misleading.

==> Swedish report is from May 2018 !

Additional disadvantages to use location based SMS in national public warning systems are: • Delivery time of Location Based SMS warning messages to groups of people in the Geo-target area is long (up to several hours e.g. in the Sweden case)[12].

The actual throughput for Location Based SMS in Sweden is around 3000 SMS per second (for all 4 operators) – alerting most cities in less than 2 minutes and the entire city of Stockholm in less than 10 minutes.

==>You are clearly no telecom expert if you stating arguments as mentioned above. The 3000 SMS per second capacity you make reference to is the central capacity of the Central SMSCs, there is no capacity to delivery 3000 SMS per second for an incident in a specific city. Moreover the 3000 SMS per second maximum capacity is used for all Person to Person (P2P) and Application to Person (A2P and P2A) traffic. Dedicated SLA have been agreed by the mobile operators to provide A2P capacity to commercial parties like banks, social media, messaging apps etc. The full capacity of 3000 SMS/s is not available for the national authorities. It does not also make sense to use the 3000 SMS/s capacity for a geo-fenced area if the available cells in a city can only submit 100 SMS/s.

• Complex, expensive and non-standardized/proprietary integrations are required to obtain network based location feeds for every mobile operator for every subscriber (MSISDN) in the geo target area. Complex integration yes, but to network location feeds that are already in place and used by all mobile operators

==>There is no standard for location based SMS agreed within telecommunication. Each of the 3 or 4 mobile operators in a country have different architectures, vendors, approaches to determine the location of subscribers (MSISDNs) in a cell. Often a mobile operator does not have the correct licenses and or systems in place to determine on a large scale which subscribers (MSISDN, IMSI) are present in a Cell and hence they need to purchase new systems and licenses. Each of the 3 or 4 mobile operators in a country have different architectures, vendors approach to deliver large amounts of SMS messages so that needs to be be agreed upon as well. For Cell Broadcast there is one standard (3GPP defined) implemented by all RAN vendors ( Ericsson , Nokia, Huawei, ZTE, etc) and one can start directly implementing Cell broadcast. That is why Location based SMS deployments take a very long time to deploy and Cell broadcast solutions only take a few weeks to deploy

• Severe constrains by privacy legislation as for location based SMS the government need location and MSISDN of each subscriber and is therefore not compliant with the latest EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), see January 2019 hack of the SMS based Emergency Alert Australia system, mobile numbers (MSISDN) were stolen out off the Australian Emergency Alert database and thousands received a hacked SMS notification about their personal data [13]. LBAS does not collect or expose any personal identifiable information (PII). Information such as MSISDN and location is kept strictly within the mobile operators networks and PII is never exposed outside the operators firewalls. Only delivery statistics (count of recipients in the area, the number of success deliveries etc.) is available outside the operator.

==> non argument. The combination of the location and the identity of a subscriber (MSISDN, IMSI) is kept somewhere that fact alone is already against the law in many countries and would require adaptation of the national law. As has for example what happened in Sweden after the UMS system was purchased and resulted in a lot of issues.

• SMS alerts are single shot messages, SMS alert messages are not repeated in the disaster area for a period of time. Wrong. Location Based SMS provides alerts with keep-alive/geo-fencing (alerting new recipients as they enter the area) as well as follow-up (new message to the same set of recipients already alerted)

==> I have never seen this feature seen working in a crisis situation, you mention here a fake option not proven and never shown in real life

• No functionality is available when SMS is used to submit different guidance to safety message to subscribers moving from one geo-target area to the other geo-target area.

Wrong. With Location Based SMS, different messages can be sent to different areas – exactly the same way as with Cell Broadcast.

==> I have never seen this feature seen working in a crisis situation, you mention here a fake option not proven and never shown in real life. As SMS delivery is based upon the MSISDN, what you are saying here is that you follow actively the locations of potentially thousands subscribers (MSISDN) in real time through a mobile network. and if they change from 1 area to the other area you can sent different messages real time. You clearly have no understanding of telecom networks, especially when you consider that the functionality you mention needs to work during a crisis in a congested part of the mobile network. With Cell Broadcast the power is that when you enter a "danger zone"or a "safe zone" you will immediately receive a new Cell broadcast when you enter the zone and this is 1 message for all subscribers present in the zone.

• Only 1 severity level is available resulting that Amber alerts and test messages are received with the same severity level as for example fire or Tsunami warnings.

Mobile operators can and will prioritize SMS for major alerts. Also, an SMS sent from alphanumeric sender such as “POLICE”, “112” has a very high attention factor as well as being reliable (operators make sure that these alphanumeric ID’s cannot be used by anyone else).

==> fraudsters are very creative in using alphanumeric addresses that a very similar to Police or 112 but just one letter of number different. We have seen this happening with commercial parties in the last years and that same is applicable for government messaging. Moreover these Government SMS messages can be used for phishing and identity theft that is done in the last years by all commercial parties using SMS and hence many commercial parties have stopped the usage of SMS e.g. banks

• No control or configuration is available for a subscriber on their Android and IOS handsets for national public warning alert messages using SMS.

No active configuration is needed by the citizen. Which is why Location Based SMS can be delivered reliably to all mobile phones – regardless of vendor, model or operating system.

==> no argument against the correct statement made

• SMS alerts regarding public safety emergencies can be sent by everybody (no exclusivity) and forwarded by everybody (no control).

Not true. Operators will not allow any other party to use senderId such as “POLICE” or “112”

==> fraudsters are very creative in using alphanumeric addresses that a very similar to Police or 112 but just one letter of number different. We have seen this happening with commercial parties in the last years and that same is applicable for government messaging.each person can forward the SMS receive from the POLICE and change the message content creating fake messages. These Government SMS messages can be used for phishing and identity theft that is done in the last years by all commercial parties using SMS and hence many commercial parties have stopped more and more the usage of SMS e.g. banks

As EU-Alert is a purely Cell Broadcast based standard created by ETSI we can also remove all references to Location Based SMS

Location Based SMS

As EU-Alert as defined in TS 102 900 V1.3.1 as defined by ETSI is a Cell Broadcast only standard. No 3GPP, ETSI, ATIS or any other standarisation body has defined a standard for location Based SMS to be used for Emergency Notification. In fact 5G americas is stating that Point-to-Point communication techniques, for example SMS and Over-the-Top (OTT) Smartphone Apps, have a number of challenges that make them undesirable for Public Warning Services; they are not designed for critical authority-to-individual emergency alerting, please refer http://www.5gamericas.org/files/6615/3236/9306/Public_Warning_Systems_Americas_WhitePaper___Final_for_distribution.pdf

In fact the EU-Alert is a Cell broadcast standard only any reference to Location Based SMS is incorrect when explaining EU-Alert standard.

Move Location Based SMS to a new article?

Following on from the discussion on Location Based SMS (LB-SMS), which does not directly relate to the EU-Alert standard outlined by ETSI. Maybe a new namespace/article for LB-SMS is desired?

LB-SMS is a separate but comparable system to EU-Alert/Cell broadcast systems and a few EU countries have implemented it as their Public Warning System (PWS). to fulfill the EU legislation recently (2018) introduced. Drumstick21 (talk) 23:00, 5 May 2023 (UTC)