shelbinator.com

Or, another reason the American mobile telecom industry is pure evil.

So I’m still procrastinating on the original anti-cellular-companies rant I promised last week, but here’s another reason to realize they’ll never give us what we want or even need without government pressure.

Cell broadcasting is a standard, but largely unused, part of every GSM and CDMA digital phone network that can transmit uniform text warnings either to all users or to defined regions. It is different from SMS in that the broadcast relays the message indiscriminately to every phone in a cell tower’s receiving area, typically a 3.2-kilometer, or 2-mile, radius, without having to know individual phone numbers. A cell broadcast usually causes phones to ring before a 162-character message scrolls across phone displays.

In October [2005], the Netherlands became the first country in Europe to require cell operators to transmit government text warnings via cell broadcasts. The government paid about E2.5 million, or $3 million, to three operators - Vodafone, KPN and Telfort - to equip their networks for cellular broadcasts.

In May [2005], South Korea became the first country in the world to switch on a nationwide cellular-based emergency system, paying wireless operators to equip their networks for broadcasts.

Resistance from large cellphone operators is the main reason cellular broadcasting has failed to make gains in the United States, even after the government’s much-criticized response to Hurricane Katrina, said Douglas Weiser, the head of the U.S. branch of the Cellular Emergency Alert Systems Association, who is based in Tampa, Florida.

Because U.S. carriers paid a combined $80 billion to buy digital mobile licenses from the government in the 1990s, Weiser said, the industry has been largely able to fend off government attempts at regulation.

Network operators are reluctant to explore the commercial potential of cell broadcasting, Weiser said, because many mistakenly think it will undermine SMS revenue.

Cell broadcasts are scattershot, like traditional broadcast television, so calling charges could not pay for any information services offered over the 64,000 different digital broadcast frequencies available on most handsets.

“The problem with cell broadcasting in the U.S. has never been the technology,” Weiser said, “it’s been a question of political will.”

That’s from a January 2006 article that’s all too relevant today. But this is not to say that even if broadcast technology had been in place it would have helped at all; as with all new technology, there’s no real revolution until it’s coupled with a serious rearrangement of organizational philosophy and decision-making processes. Chances are the Virginia Tech leadership might’ve had a hard time activating such an alert without an additional 20 minutes and several phone calls. This mopocket.com post shines some good light on another existing solution in e2campus.com, an cellular phone alert system targeted for colleges and universities. However, those require opt-in (and thus opt-outable) SMS subscriptions for each user, another small stumbling block.

Regardless, cellular technology exists that makes all of the problems with an alert system entirely procedural, and if the United States was in the lead, as it should be, in mobile telecommunications instead of woefully behind the rest of the industrialized world, it’s quite conceivable that many, many lives would have been saved yesterday.

That they were not is a sin on behalf of telecom lobbyists and fatcats that we should not forget.