Alcatel-Lucent introduces emergency alert solution for wireless carriers

Alcatel-Lucent announced today that its Broadcast Message Center (BMC) is now available for wireless carriers to purchase, providing one piece of the Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS) that the wireless industry is required to have operational by April 2012. Requirements for the nation’s CMAS have been under development for several years, with the goal of enabling a means of getting emergency messages to cellphone users on a local or national basis.

Each major wireless service provider is expected to install two BMCs for redundancy, Alcatel-Lucent Product Messaging Manager Jay Bhatt told Connected Planet. The BMCs will receive alerts through a gateway operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and will broadcast them as text messages to cellphone users in the affected areas. Eventually the government expects to expand CMAS to support multimedia messages, Bhatt said.

Three types of alerts

The CMAS system will support three types of emergency messages, Bhatt explained. These include presidential messages about national emergencies, as well as imminent threat alerts, which could be weather or security related, and Amber Alerts involving missing children. Presidential alerts will be sent to all cellphone users nationwide, while the other two types of alerts will be sent on a county-by-county basis.

Another critical element of the CMAS solution is handsets capable of receiving CMAS text messages and generating a special alert tone. Subscribers with CMAS-ready handsets will have the option of receiving Amber Alerts and imminent threat alerts, but presidential alerts will be mandatory, Bhatt explained.

Alcatel-Lucent has tested its BMC offering with prototype handsets supporting CMAS capabilities, Bhatt said. He expects CMAS-ready handsets to be on the market by the middle of next year.

A hefty investment

A final requirement for CMAS to function properly is for wireless carriers to enable their networks to support cell broadcast, which involves upgrades to numerous devices throughout the network. Purchasing and installing BNCs and upgrading networks to support cell broadcast is a “pretty hefty investment,” Bhatt said.

Not surprisingly, some small wireless operators do not plan to deploy their own CMAS solutions but instead will use a hosted solution, such as one that Alcatel-Lucent plans to offer based on a monthly service fee.

Initially some wireless carriers said they did not plan to support CMAS, but that choice would have required them to inform subscribers that their service lacked that capability. An Alcatel Lucent spokesman said that virtually all carriers are now expected to support CMAS, either directly or by purchasing a hosted solution, out of a fear that they might otherwise lose customers.

Carriers that make the investment in CMAS infrastructure may be able to recoup some of the costs of that investment by using the platform to support paid alert messages from county offices, universities, and the like, Bhatt added.

The Alcatel-Lucent solution

The Alcatel-Lucent BMC currently works with GSM, CDMA and UMTS networks. The company is working on an LTE version, which Bhatt expects to be available in third quarter of 2011.