This is Not a Drill: The Importance of Emergency Alerts Today
Anurag Lal, President and CEO of Infinite Convergence.
In times of emergency, it’s vital for government agencies to be able to reach their citizens quickly and efficiently to help ensure people’s safety. With this in mind, many have turned to using wireless emergency alerts (WEA’s) to disseminate this type of information. WEA’s utilize cell phone towers to send alerts to geographically targeted areas. This alerts people’s smart phones with a loud tone and a message that stays on a user’s home screen, ensuring that the message is received clearly.
Within the United States, many are likely familiar with WEA’s, as the most popular use cases of this include AMBER alerts or severe weather notifications. However, at the on-set of the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of WEA’s began to evolve, now able to be a tool to provide vital information to the masses. This includes Presidential alerts, which can be sent to people across the entire country—a vital option in the face of the global pandemic.
To enable government agencies with the equipment needed to communicate vital information like this, NetSfere offers its 5G equipped NetSfere Broadcast Message Center (BMC). The NetSfere BMC is a field-proven, carrier-grade emergency alert solution designed to assist in distributing WEA’s to targeted regions. The technology supports all major radio access technologies including 5G, LTE, CDMA, GSM and UMTS to provide alerts to all cellular users.
NetSfere has an extensive track record of serving government agencies with this technology already, currently acting as the leading provider for all major carriers to deploy wireless emergency alerts (WEA’s) across North America, Europe and Asia. Furthermore, it’s WEA (Wireless Emergency Alert) compliant, as well as ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute), CAP (Common Alerting Protocol), and WPAS (Wireless Public Alerting Service) compliant—ensuring that all regulations are met.
The importance of WEA’s continues to rise, and the NetSfere BMC provides a vital services to help government agencies connect with people in the most effective way possible. The BMC gives these agencies the ability to send an alert to any mobile device, offering a direct line of communication when its needed most. According to Statista, there are currently more than 275 million smart phone users in the United States alone. Furthermore, there are billions of mobile users worldwide—smartphones and otherwise—therefore solidifying why WEA’s are the best option to reach people in times of crisis.
Other methods of communication, like social media or TV broadcast, won’t always reach the right people in moments of crisis. It can be difficult to cut through the noise on social media, and it’s hard to know how many people are actually tuned into a broadcast at any given time—especially as it’s becoming increasingly popular to cut out cable services to opt for streaming options instead. In today’s technology-forward society, many people have their cell phone handy at any given time—making the BMC the most effective way to reach people in an emergency.
Beyond government agencies, enterprise must also have the ability to send similar alerts to their own community of employees, partners, and more. Should an emergency arise, enterprises need a mobile-first, centralized platform that is not only secure, compliant and reliable, but one that also works seamlessly within the workplace, remote, or on a mobile device. This ensures that the right information reaches employees, stakeholders and more in a timely manner, so they are informed and understand any immediate action needed.
Let NetSfere equip your organization with the right tools to reach your citizens, community, employees, and more when it matters most. To learn more, reach out to us today.
