Cell Broadcast (CB) is a method of sending messages to multiple mobile telephone users in a defined area at the same time. It is defined by the ETSI’s GSM committee and 3GPP and is part of the 2G, 3G, 4G

LTE (telecommunication) In telecommunications, long-term evolution (LTE) is a Technical standard, standard for wireless broadband communication for mobile devices and data terminals, based on the GSM/Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution, EDGE and UMTS/High Speed Pac ...

and 5G standards. It is also known as

Short Message Service Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short tex ...

-Cell Broadcast (SMS-CB) or CB SMS. Unlike Short Message Service-Point to Point (SMS-PP), Cell Broadcast is a one-to-many geo-targeted and

geo-fence A geofence is a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area. A geofence could be dynamically generated (as in a radius around a point location) or match a predefined set of boundaries (such as school zones or neighborhood boundaries). T ...

d messaging service.

History

Cell Broadcast messaging was first demonstrated in

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. Si ...

in 1997. Some mobile operators used Cell Broadcast for communicating the area code of the antenna cell to the mobile user (via channel 050), for nationwide or citywide alerting, weather reports, mass messaging, location-based news, etc. Cell broadcast has been widely deployed since 2008 by major Asian, US, Canadian, South American and European network operators. Not all operators have the Cell Broadcast messaging function activated in their network yet, but most of the currently used handsets support cell broadcast, however on many devices it is disabled by default and there isn't a standardised interface to enable the feature.

Technology

One Cell Broadcast message can reach a large number of telephones at once. Cell Broadcast messages are directed to radio cells, rather than to a specific telephone. The latest generation of Cell Broadcast Systems (CBS) can send to the whole mobile network (e.g. 1,000,000 cells) in less than 10 seconds, reaching millions of mobile subscribers at the same time. A Cell Broadcast message is an unconfirmed push service, meaning that the originators of the messages do not know who has received the message, allowing for services based on anonymity. Cell Broadcast is compliant with the latest EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as mobile phone numbers are not required by CB. The originator (alerting authority) of the Cell Broadcast message can request the success rate of a message. In such a case the Cell Broadcast System will respond with the number of addressed cells and the number of cells that have broadcast the Cell broadcast (alert) message. The CB message parameters contain the broadcasting schedule. If the start-time is left open, the CBC system will assume an immediate start, which will be the case for Public Warning messages. If the end-time is left open, the message will be repeated indefinitely. A subsequent cancel message shall be used to stop this message. The repetition rate can be set between 2 seconds and to values beyond 30 minutes. Each repeated CB message will have the same message identifier (indicating the source of the message), and the same serial number. Using this information, the mobile telephone is able to identify and ignore broadcasts of already received messages. A Cell Broadcast message page is composed of 82

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s, which, using the default character set, can encode 93 characters. Up to 15 of these pages may be concatenated to form a Cell Broadcast message (hence maximum length of one Cell broadcast message is therefore 1395 characters). A Cell Broadcast Centre (CBC), a system which is the source of SMS-CB, is connected to a Base Station Controller (BSC) in GSM networks, to a Radio Network Controller (RNC) in UMTS networks, to a Mobility Management Entity (MME) in

networks or to a core Access and Mobility management Function (AMF) in 5G networks. The technical implementation of the cell broadcast service is described in the 3GPP specification TS 23.041 *The 2G-CBC (BSC) interface is described in 3GPP standard TS 48.049; however, non-standard implementations exist. *The 3G-CBC (RNC) interface is described in 3GPP standard TS 25.419. *The 4G-CBC (MME) interface is described in 3GPP standard TS 29.168. *The 5G-CBC (AMF) interface is described in 3GPP standard TS 29.518. A CBC sends CB messages, a list of cells where messages are to be broadcast, and the requested repetition rate and number of times they shall be broadcast to the BSC/RNC/MME/AMF. The BSC's/RNC's/MME/AMF responsibility is to deliver the CB messages to the base station (BTSs), NodeBs,

ENodeB E-UTRAN Node B, also known as Evolved Node B (abbreviated as eNodeB or eNB), is the element in E-UTRA of LTE that is the evolution of the element Node B in UTRA of UMTS. It is the hardware that is connected to the mobile phone network that co ...

s and gNodeBs which handle the requested cells.

Emergency communication system

Cell Broadcast is not affected by traffic load; therefore, it is very suitable during a disaster when load spikes of data (

social media Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social me ...

and

mobile app A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on d ...

), regular SMS and voice calls usage (

mass call event A mass call event or mass calling event (also MCE in telephony usage) is a situation in which an extraordinarily high number of telephone calls are attempted into or out of an area, causing tremendous network congestion, and therefore service wh ...

s) tend to significantly congest mobile networks, as multiple events have shown. Broadcast messages are used in most countries to send emergency alerts, using as input a CAP (

Common Alerting Protocol The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) is an XML-based data format for exchanging public warnings and emergencies between alerting technologies. CAP allows a warning message to be consistently disseminated simultaneously over many warning systems to ...

) message as specified by OASIS (organization) or Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) C-interface protocol, which has been specified jointly by the

Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) is a standards organization that develops technical and operational standards and solutions for the ICT industry, headquartered in Washington, D.C. The organization is accredited by the ...

(ATIS) and the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA). Advantages of using Cell Broadcast for Public warning are: * Sending out a Cell Broadcast message to a few or millions of people takes less than 10 seconds * Cell Broadcast has a unique and dedicated ringtone and vibration * Only an authorized authority and the serving mobile network are able to send out the Cell Broadcast messages * 99% of all handsets used today support Cell Broadcast * Cell Broadcast supports per CB-message a maximum message length of 1395 characters in Latin and 615 characters in Universal Coded Character Set (UCS-2) encoding in order to support e.g.

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...

Chinese alphabet There have been Chinese alphabets, that are pre-existing alphabets adapted to write down the Chinese language. However, the standard Chinese writing system uses a non-alphabetic script with an alphabet for supplementary use. There is no original alp ...

Urdu Urdu (;"Urdu"
'' Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as ...

. * Cell Broadcast supports multiple languages * Cell Broadcast supports the use of URLs and Web-links in the alert message * Cell Broadcast supports Device Based Geo-Fencing * Cell Broadcast supports the update within seconds of existing alert messages due to changing hazard situations * Cell Broadcast supports the mechanism to inform and instruct people within seconds in the adjacent hazard areas * Cell Broadcast is able to reach all mobile subscribers including roaming subscribers (in their own language) * Cell Broadcast is not affected by mobile network congestion * Cell Broadcast is not affected by access class baring and or SIM class baring * Cell Broadcast is not affected by any data protection constraints as no personal data (subscriber identity or MSISDN) is required and used to deliver the message. * Cell Broadcast can be used to address people present in an individual cell sector or large polygons covering a complete city or country. * Cell Broadcast messages can be updated as incident conditions change during an event at the end of an event an all-clear can be given. * Cell Broadcast is suitable for monthly or half yearly national public warning awareness tests * Cell Broadcast enablement in the mobile network has no influence on the battery life of mobile devices

Cell Broadcast adoption rate

A point of criticism in the past on Cell Broadcast was that there was no uniform user experience on all mobile devices in a country. Wireless Emergency Alerts and Government alerts using Cell Broadcast are supported in most models of mobile telephones. Some smart phones have a configuration menu that offer opt-out capabilities for certain public warning severity levels. In case a national civil defence organisation is adopting one of the Wireless Emergency Alerts standards, WEA - formerly known as CMAS in North America,

EU-Alert EU-Alert is the generic term for the European Public Warning Service based upon Cell Broadcast technology. EU-Alert is compatible with Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) formerly known as the Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS) standard as used i ...

in Europe, LAT-Alert in South America, Earthquake Tsunami Warning System in Japan, each subscriber in that country either making use of the home network or is roaming automatically makes use of the embedded Public warning Cell Broadcast feature present in every

Android (operating system) Android is a mobile operating system based on a modified version of the Linux kernel and other open-source software, designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Android is developed by a consortium of d ...

and iOS mobile device. * * In countries that have selected Cell Broadcast to transmit public warning messages, up to 99% of the handsets receive the cell broadcast message (reaching between 85-95% of the entire population as not all people have a mobile phone) within seconds after the government authorities have submitted the message; see as examples

Emergency Mobile Alert Emergency Mobile Alerts (EMA) is an alerting network in New Zealand designed to disseminate emergency alerts to mobile devices. Emergency Mobile Alerts are messages about emergencies sent by New Zealand authorised emergency agencies to capable mobi ...

(New Zealand), Wireless Emergency Alerts (USA) and NL-Alert (Netherlands).

Public warning implementations

Wireless Emergency Alert - Tornado Warning

Many countries and regions have implemented location-based alert systems based on cell broadcast. The alert messages to the population, already broadcast by various media, are relayed over the mobile network using cell broadcast. *

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. With an area of , Australia is the largest country by ...

Emergency Alert Australia Emergency Alert Australia is an emergency communications scheme set up by the Australian Commonwealth Government in response to the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009, utilizing telecommunications systems as another form of alert for citizens. The ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by to ...

Alert Ready The National Public Alerting System (NPAS; french: Système national d'alertes à la population), branded as Alert Ready (), is the national warning system in Canada, broadcast to Canadian television, radio, and wireless devices. The system co ...

Chile Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in the western part of South America. It is the southernmost country in the world, and the closest to Antarctica, occupying a long and narrow strip of land between the Andes to the eas ...

- Sistema de Alerta de Emergencias (SAE) *

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are located primarily in Europe, Europe. The union has a total area of ...

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

FR-Alert
*

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwee ...

(MoWaS) *

Greece Greece,, or , romanized: ', officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the southern tip of the Balkans, and is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Greece shares land borders wi ...

- GR-Alert *

Hong Kong Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a List of cities in China, city and Special administrative regions of China, special ...

- emergency alert system (EAS) first used on March 9, 2022. *

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the n ...

- Earthquake Early Warning *

Lithuania Lithuania (; lt, Lietuva ), officially the Republic of Lithuania ( lt, Lietuvos Respublika, links=no ), is a country in the Baltic region of Europe. It is one of three Baltic states and lies on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea. Lithuania ...

- LT-Alert *

Netherlands ) , anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau") , image_map = , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands , established_title = Before independence , established_date = Spanish Netherl ...

- NL-Alert *

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island coun ...

Oman Oman ( ; ar, عُمَان ' ), officially the Sultanate of Oman ( ar, سلْطنةُ عُمان ), is an Arabian country located in southwestern Asia. It is situated on the southeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula, and spans the mouth of ...

- Oman-Alert *

Philippines The Philippines (; fil, Pilipinas, links=no), officially the Republic of the Philippines ( fil, Republika ng Pilipinas, links=no), * bik, Republika kan Filipinas * ceb, Republika sa Pilipinas * cbk, República de Filipinas * hil, Republ ...

- Emergency Cell Broadcast System (ECBS) *

Romania Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern, and Southeast Europe, Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, S ...

- RO-ALERT *

Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in Western Asia. It covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, and has a land area of about , making it the fifth-largest country in Asia, the second-largest in the Ara ...

- KSA-Alert *

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and sharing a Korean Demilitarized Zone, land border with North Korea. Its western border is formed ...

- Korean Public Alert Service (used daily for regional COVID numbers and additionally almost daily for example to inform about the closure of a metro line or cold weather) *

Sri Lanka Sri Lanka (, ; si, ශ්‍රී ලංකා, Śrī Laṅkā, translit-std=ISO (); ta, இலங்கை, Ilaṅkai, translit-std=ISO ()), formerly known as Ceylon and officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, is an ...

- Disaster and Emergency Warning Network (DEWN) *

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the no ...

- Public Warning Cell Broadcast Service *

Turkey Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with a small portion on the Balkan Peninsula ...

- UYARSİS *

Ukraine Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inva ...

- currently being tested * United Arabic Emirates - UAE-Alert *

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

- Wireless Emergency Alerts

Countries in the process of implementation

The following countries and regions have selected Cell Broadcast to use for their national public warning system but are currently in the process of implementing. *

Denmark ) , song = ( en, "King Christian stood by the lofty mast") , song_type = National and royal anthem , image_map = EU-Denmark.svg , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of Denmark , establish ...

- Put into operation June 2022. *

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...

(delayed) *

Mexico Mexico (Spanish language, Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a List of sovereign states, country in the southern portion of North America. It is borders of Mexico, bordered to the north by the United States; to the so ...

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of ...

Peru , image_flag = Flag of Peru.svg , image_coat = Escudo nacional del Perú.svg , other_symbol = Great Seal of the State , other_symbol_type = National seal , national_motto = "Firm and Happy f ...

Spain , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = '' Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond") , national_anthem = (English: "Royal March") , ...

(ES-Alert) *

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and ...

References

External links

3GPP - The current standardization body for GSM with free standards available
* ttps://www.3gpp.org/DynaReport/25419.htm 3GPP TS 25.419 UTRAN Iu-BC interface: Service Area Broadcast Protocol (SABP)br>3GPP TS 44.012 Short Message Service Cell Broadcast (SMSCB) support on the mobile radio interface
* ttps://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/html-info/48049.htm 3GPP TS 48.049 BSC-CBC interface specification; Cell Broadcast Service Protocol (CBSP)br>3GPP TS 29.168 Cell Broadcast Centre interfaces with the Evolved Packet Core; Stage 3
{{Cell Broadcast System Mobile telecommunications standards 3GPP standards Emergency population warning systems Emergency communication