[EAS] WEA is not a super-tweet: NL Police warnings about football match

[Sean Donelan]

On Thu, 25 May 2017, Botterell, Arthur at CalOES wrote:
> Sean, unless I'm mistaken the Dutch system predates both CMAS/WEA and 
> was based on the 3GPP cell-broadcast specification, which later was also 
> adopted in implementing WEA.  Indeed, there were folks advocating for 
> adoption of cell-broadcast here in the States, and citing the 
> Netherlands example, years before the 2006 WARN act mandated creation 
> of what has become WEA.

Although cell-broadcast is the basis for mobile alerting standards in 
several countries, they aren't all compatible with each other.

The Dutch NL-Alert system was implemented in 2012, based on CMAS/WEA, 
about the same time as the U.S. system.

The Netherlands had some earlier alert trials in 2005, also based on 
cell-broadcast. However, trial dutch system was based on some 
semi-proprietary protocols with specific Dutch providers. In the world of 
global standards, economies of scale tend to drive manufacturers. 
Small markets tend to migrate to standards used across larger markets.

The Netherlands migrated from its country-specific cell-broadcast alert
standard to EU-Alert standard (european-wide). The ETSI EU-Alert standard 
was intentionally designed to be compatible with ATIS CMAS standards. The 
Dutch were one of the big advocates for smartphone alerts could 
easily inter-operate in both U.S. and EU service areas and providers.

Japan still has a unique cell-broadcast protocol implmentation.  I believe 
one of the 5G next-generation goals is to unify more of the mobile phone 
public warning standards.

> The dozens of repeat NL-Alert messages sounds like a processing 
> foul-up, not unlike what happened in Pennsylvania... or, to recall the 
> canonical example, like the 1971 "wrong paper-tape" EAN.  (Few stations 
> actually activated... here's an aircheck from one that did: 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu4r79l8P8I).

The dozen duplicate message problem isn't an operator (alert originator) 
error. In previous incidents, an operator error was been ruled out. An 
operator hitting the "send" button a dozen times doesn't seem likely in 
this incident either. The repeating alert message problem is on-going 
cell-broadcast technology problem. The problem doesn't seem to affect 
every phone, or every message. This problem also happens in the U.S.

Its not clear whether its a handset bug, a cell site bug, or some weird 
synchronization bug between multiple towers.  Whatever the cause, it is 
extremely annoying to user to have alarm on the phone repeatly go
off every few minutes.

Even though it happens infrequently, and so far unpredictable; I hope the 
cell industry fixes the repeating alert message problem.