Cell Broadcast at the Assembly of the Republic

Following a European directive and the bad examples of the Portuguese reality regarding the sending of SMS in case of emergency, VOST Portugal, a group of digital volunteers in emergency situations, alerted this week the members of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, Rights, Freedoms and Guarantees to the need for Portugal to urgently monitor the adoption of Cell Broadcast technology in sending emergency information to citizens.

This initiative is being coordinated by VOST Portugal in conjunction with the EENA – European Emergency Number Association – which, for its part, will ask the Portuguese Government what initiatives are being taken by the competent authorities.

In the letter sent to Members from all parliamentary benches, VOST Portugal refers to the case history: On 11 December 2018, the European Union made it mandatory to have a public warning system (DIRECTIVE (EU) 2018/1972 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 11 December 2018 establishing the European Electronic Communications Code). The Government has approved Decree-Law No. 2/2019 establishing the National System for Monitoring and Communication of Risk, Special Alert and Warning to the Population. However, the government does not specify which alert system via mobile device will be used to alert populations, and its choice will be made by the CNPC following the recommendation of the ANPC, and all contacts with the ANPC that we tried to initiate were received with silence by that entity.

VOST Portugal states that “with regard to sending alerts to mobile phones, in addition to applications that may be developed, there are two systems: SMS and Cell Broadcast. It is our understanding, based on technical reports, that the choice of an alert system to the populations is vital for their safety and that this has to be a public discussion because it is a decision that will affect the entire population, as well as those who visit us, for years to come.”. It also hopes that:The adoption of a mobile alert system should be a public discussion, and the technology to be adopted should not be based on the associated cost of implementing one or the other solution, but rather on the benefits that the adoption of one or the other system can bring to the populations. “

The experience we have in Portugal, and in other countries of the European Union, is that the SMS sending system is ineffective due to the delay in delivering the message (during Hurricane Leslie some messages arrived 36 hours after they were sent), there is the possibility that through human error the messages are delivered to people who are not in the intervention area (there were reports of people in Angola and Brazil who received the message sent to the population of Lisbon during the same adverse weather phenomenon), and the sending of the message by SMS to millions of recipients saturates the communication systems making virtually impossible communications, even those to whom 112 is addressed.

On the other hand, there is a system called Cell Broadcast It does not suffer from the same technological constraints that exist in the sending of alerts to mobile phones, since the sending of the message is instantaneous, limited to a certain area and that sends the message to all the devices registered in a certain communications tower.