The feature sends out alerts for natural disasters and extreme weather conditions, reaching telecom users in a matter of seconds. The system was put on pause at State Disaster Management Agencies (SDMA)’s end after an errant alert went off in Central Delhi.
The story so far: Following a few weeks of break, the Cell Broadcast System (CBS) has been resumed in India, according to Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) CEO Rajkumar Upadhyay.
The CBS displays a prominent alert on most smartphones and many feature phones sold over the last decade. The system uses common messaging protocols that have been incorporated by all the major handset makers around the world. However, Mr. Upadhyay of C-DOT pointed out that only two major providers existed until his organisation developed and finalised its own implementation. “So you have to work very hard to make it work as per Motorola Radio, Siemens Radio, [ZTE] Radio, Huawei Radio. Utimaco, a Germany-based firm that has set up a CBS solution for several countries, sued the Union government for not allowing private firms to bid for rolling out a CBS. The government argued in the case that CBS was a strategically important infrastructure that would be important to build and operate domestically.
In [ZTE] also, if it is a 2G radio version one, it is different; version 2 is different. There are not less than 300-350 adapters,” he said, adding that C-DOT had to write code for each of these hundreds of adapters to make the system work.
“It is a very complex technology,” Mr. Upadhyay said, since there is a huge variety of telecom gear out in the market.
