Civil protection: Mobile phone alarm successfully tested in Austria

Years late, Austria is introducing official alerts in text form that are automatically sent to cell phones. Initial public tests in parts of the country were successful on Monday, according to the authorities. An Austria-wide test is to follow on October 5 as part of the annual civil defense trial alert. The system, called AT-Alert, will then go into regular operation. This was already planned for 2019.

However, the necessary ordinance to support civil protection with cell broadcasting in Austria was only issued a year and a half ago. The document sets out the technical parameters. Cell broadcast can be used to send disaster warnings, calls to search for missing children and similar urgent messages to cell phones free of charge. The messages are broadcast to all compatible smartphones that are logged into a radio cell – regardless of telephone numbers. Hence the name Cell Broadcast.

The AT-Alert will supplement the existing civil defense sirens as a warning and alarm system. In the event of an emergency, as many people as possible in an affected area should be reached directly via their cell phone. However, not every cell phone displays the messages automatically. Depending on the model, the user must update the operating system in advance and make the appropriate settings.

The senders define the geographical target area, the network operators then select the appropriate mobile phone cells from –, which can of course vary from network to network, especially in rural areas. In the outskirts of a warning area, cell phones registered in one mobile network may therefore display a warning, while phones registered in another network may not.

Ten senders, redundant systems

Germany activatedCell Broadcast on February 23, 2023 and has been using it intensively ever since – there were 219 alerts in Germany in the first year. In the event of disasters, the alerts are sent by the situation centers of the federal states and the control centers of the districts and independent cities. In Austria, there are ten senders: the Ministry of the Interior and the state warning centers of the nine federal states, which are also responsible for civil protection. In the USA, official emergency messages have been distributed to cell phones since 2012.

Every Austrian mobile operator must operate two independent cell broadcast centers (CBC). Technically, Austria relies on the Common Alerting Protocol CAP 1.2 from OASIS in the AT-Alert version. This variant dispenses with many optional parameters in order to keep the system simple. The Austrian authorities emphasize that it is important to install the latest operating system on the cell phones so that the alerts can also be received.

Reduced to the max: no pictures, no advertising

The messages are sent out repeatedly, every minute to ten minutes depending on the urgency. The repetitions are used to reach end devices that were not logged in during previous attempts. A unique identification number ensures that a cell phone does not display the same warning message a second time, even if it has changed mobile network.

There are no multimedia elements because sending them in bulk could overload the networks. Hyperlinks could theoretically be included in the text, but their use is controversial: If tens of thousands of recipients click on the link to a website or a telephone number at the same time, the network could falter again.

Technically, the system is suitable for all kinds of messages, not just warnings and their tests. For example, Cell Broadcast was introduced in Tanzania in 2008 to display discounts on mobile phone tariffs depending on the current network utilization. Such commercial applications are not planned in Austria. The system was first presented to the public back in 1997.

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