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wea

Wireless subscribers in the US have been seeing occasional emergency alert notifications in recent years. These letters can make the public aware of imminent danger from natural disasters or terrorist attacks, or but help police force enforcement notice a missing child. Notwithstanding, after the recent bombings in New York and New Bailiwick of jersey, there's pressure to amend these alerts, which are currently woefully inadequate. Luckily, the FCC already has a plan.

A number of government agencies including FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security started designing the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) in 2007. Participation in the organisation is not mandatory for wireless carriers, but the big four US carriers — AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon — have all added back up. The limited functionality of these messages was painfully obvious recently when police were seeking Ahmad Khan Rahami, who is suspected of setting the bombs that exploded in several areas of New York and New Bailiwick of jersey.

The WEA message sent to subscribers in the region on September 19th read, "WANTED: Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28-yr-old male person. See media for pic. Call 9-1-one if seen." Run across? It's not very helpful. It doesn't say what Rahami is suspected of, if he'due south unsafe, and it certainly doesn't have a flick. Rahami was somewhen establish by police sleeping in the doorway of a bar after the owner recognized the man. The emergency alert was not a factor in the capture.

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Many found the WEA text confusing and information technology lacked any data that would have made Rahami easier to find. WEA letters are limited to ninety characters, even less than a traditional SMS. They too can't include multimedia or embedded hyperlinks. At present, the FCC is looking to improve the WEA messages with some long overdue changes.

Under the FCC proposal, WEA would be able to support as many as 360 characters as well as embedded links and media. These features will only be supported on LTE networks, but the bulk of wireless subscribers are connected to LTE these days. The upgraded system would also include narrower geo-targeting of subscribers, assuasive messages to be pushed but to those who would do good. The FCC actually floated the idea late final year, but in the wake of the bombings, information technology has voted to implement it.

The changes volition require carriers to deploy a number of new technologies as office of WEA in the coming twelvemonth. Still, many of these features be in standard SMS, and then it shouldn't exist too difficult to achieve compliance for WEA.