Poll: Public emergency alerts to be sent to all UK mobile phones

Did you receive the Alert?

  • Yes

    Votes: 134 56.5%

  • No

    Votes: 103 43.5%
  • Total voters
    237
Apparently at work one person's went off at 14:58, 3-4 people at around 5 minutes past and most people's didn't get it LOL. Seems quite a fail to me.
 
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So the UK government did a test and some people didn't receive an alert, that seems like great news since tests are normally a good opportunity to find faults and fix them before a real emergency.
 
Roar87 said:
So the UK government did a test and some people didn't receive an alert, that seems like great news since tests are normally a good opportunity to find faults and fix them before a real emergency.
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In that respect - but they are talking it up as minor issues, while in my experience it was quite widespread - only 1 of approx. 8 phones in my house received it, only about 25% of people at work did, though some did mention they'd disabled it.
 
Blackjack Davy said:
Yeah but then that makes it highly selective if it was a text my phone would receive it as its not 4g/5g I received diddly squat. Since its supposed to be a national alert system its pretty darn lacking
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SMS cannot from memory be set to do "all phones in area" at a cell tower level as SMS is an addressed message type. It also cannot handle the level of messages in addition to any normal traffic that would be required, let alone under potentially emergency conditions in many cases as SMS is "best effort" system with relatively low priority from memory.
I don't know if you've ever noticed how at New Year's you'll sometimes get SMS messages hours after they're sent, or at major events you'll have issues getting a signal for your network, IIRC the emergency signal can be received regardless of network as long as it's 4g or higher (it's part of the "emergency" specs, much like you can call 999 even if you've got no sim card in, or no signal from your provider but a signal from another).

It's a known limitation of the system that it won't work with 3g, and the reason for that is because 3g was finalised 20+ years ago and the need for mobile phone warning systems was only really recognised after the 2004 Tsunami, IIRC the warning ability was brought in fully as part of 4g which launched in around 2009.

The number of 3g only phones is decreasing by the day, at this point I suspect it's been actively hard to pick up a 3g phone new for several years, I know my previous phone which was about the cheapest smartphone I could find was 4g and that was about 6 years ago.
I'd also wonder how many of the "3g" phones are actually 3g only, and how many could go to 4g or even 5g with a new sim.

Basically yes it won't work on 3g phones, but those phones are largely going to stop working in the near future in UK anyway (IIRC end of year for some networks) as they are considered that obsolete, so why bother trying to shoehorn it in at the expense of it's functionality past the next 8 months.
 
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Werewolf said:
SMS cannot from memory be set to do "all phones in area" at a cell tower level as SMS is an addressed message type. It also cannot handle the level of messages in addition to any normal traffic that would be required, let alone under potentially emergency conditions in many cases as SMS is "best effort" system with relatively low priority from memory.
I don't know if you've ever noticed how at New Year's you'll sometimes get SMS messages hours after they're sent, or at major events you'll have issues getting a signal for your network, IIRC the emergency signal can be received regardless of network as long as it's 4g or higher (it's part of the "emergency" specs, much like you can call 999 even if you've got no sim card in, or no signal from your provider but a signal from another).

It's a known limitation of the system that it won't work with 3g, and the reason for that is because 3g was finalised 20+ years ago and the need for mobile phone warning systems was only really recognised after the 2004 Tsunami, IIRC the warning ability was brought in fully as part of 4g which launched in around 2009.

The number of 3g only phones is decreasing by the day, at this point I suspect it's been actively hard to pick up a 3g phone new for several years, I know my previous phone which was about the cheapest smartphone I could find was 4g and that was about 6 years ago.
I'd also wonder how many of the "3g" phones are actually 3g only, and how many could go to 4g or even 5g with a new sim.

Basically yes it won't work on 3g phones, but those phones are largely going to stop working in the near future in UK anyway (IIRC end of year for some networks) as they are considered that obsolete, so why bother trying to shoehorn it in at the expense of it's functionality past the next 8 months.
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Some operators have removed 3G support in Switzerland. It dead technology taking up some of the frequency spectrum
 
My wife's phone suddenly started playing music at 2:58 am this morning we were both fast asleep and suddenly the phone just woke up and started playing the music we had on the night before...... really odd never done it before....I'm blaming this emergency alert system, both of us didn't get the proper alert....
 
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