What is Cell Broadcasting?
- Cell Broadcasting (CB) is an existing function of most modern digital mobile phone systems, such as GSM UMTS and CDMA. It differs from SMS in that, while it does put text messages on the screen of the phone, (like SMS does), it does this to ‘all-at-once’ and not ‘one-at-a-time’ as SMS does.
- This is particularly valuable in times of emergency as government may need to reach millions of citizens within seconds; all while telecom systems are in full overload!
- CB works even in full overload, does not itself contribute to load, will not crash the networks, and can reach 95% of mobile phone users within about 20-30 seconds.
- CB is scalable from about one block to the whole country, without causing significant overload problems of its own. Officials can select towers or groups of towers to make the message geo-specific.
- It is possible to secure the whole communications link from authorised sender to citizen, so that citizens can trust the message, and networks can be sure that it wont be abused for spam or hacks.
Since it uses existing mobile networks infrastructure, it is suitable for developed and least developed countries alike,
Significantly, we have developed technology whereby the senders can select the area where the message is to be sent, giving the ability to give different messages to different areas.
In addition, since there are 64000 different channels, different uses can be kept apart so that people are not bothered by spam. This means that many other uses can be found for this feature, some of which may be used by mobile devices but some of which may be for other devices., such as in-car navigation and information services.
