SMS use in times of emergency is being embraced by government officials in Glasgow, Suffolk and Yorkshire.
And now it’s time to see if the public is just as eager to embrace it.
The government is set to test a text message alert system in these regions to gauge public response to the effort.
EE, Vodafone and O2 will help the government with the trials, and customers will be able to sign up to receive the alerts, with around 50,000 messages expected to be sent.
Text messages will be distributed to mobile phones with warnings about emergency situations.
“The trials are designed to find out which is better for sending information: a cell broadcast service (CBS), which sends a ‘text-type message to all handsets in a defined area,’ or a location-based SMS messaging service, where all numbers in a specific location receive an SMS message,” says Dan Worth of V3.
Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude welcomed the involvement of the operators, and said testing out mobile alerts was a key part of the government’s use of technology to improve citizens’ safety.
“The government will conduct separate tests later this year to look at a how different technologies work and how the public react when they receive an emergency alert to their phone,” Maude said, according to this week’s report.
