New emergency alert system will target cellphones by location

Stuart Corner
Monday, 16 January 2012 06:08

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

The Victorian Government has signed a contract with Telstra on behalf of the Federal Government to enhance the national Emergency Alert telephone warning system so that the selection of mobile phones to receive alerts will be based on their location rather than their billing address, as at present.

Federal minister for emergency management, Robert McClelland, said: "The current emergency alert system provides warnings to landlines and mobile phones based on the customer's registered service address. This new location-based solution will send warnings to mobile phones that are physically in an emergency zone when a disaster strikes."

Acting Victorian premier Peter Ryan claimed that the new technology had no national or international precedent. "The Victorian Government has led negotiations with telecommunications carriers on behalf of all states and territories, and negotiations are continuing with Optus and Vodafone," Ryan said, adding that location based delivery was expected to be operational across Australia by November 2012.

However this is not the case. Telstra is able to operate the current system independent of the other mobile operators by gathering address data from the Integrated Public Number Database, but it is not able to determine the location of non-Telstra phones by using network information, and messages to those phones will be delivered by their respective network operators

A Telstra spokesman told ExchangeDaily "The solution will use a defined web services interface via which each participating carrier will receive a query and the message to be sent. The carrier will use this to identify and send text messages to mobile phones on their network within the affected area."