Why is harmonization important? Coastal areas are vulnerable to rapid-onset, broad-spectrum hazards such as tsunamis and cyclones. Coastal areas also attract large numbers of tourists. Therefore, these disasters affect not only the nationals of the countries they occur in, but also tourists. For example, Sweden, which far from the Indian Ocean, had 20,000-30,000 tourists in the tsunami affected coastal areas of Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia when the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami occurred. It lost 543 citizens and over 1,500 Swedish tourists required emergency medical assistance and transportation home. The 2004 tsunami was one of Sweden’s worst natural disasters, even though it occurred thousands of miles away from its shores.

Cell broadcasting, which is capable of reaching almost all mobiles within the range of a base station, is an ideal vehicle for transmitting early warning (and of coordinating disaster response). However, its efficacy with tourists depends on harmonization of channel addresses. If the channels opened for receipt of warnings in a tourist’s home country are not used for the same purpose in the visited country, it is clear that the tourist will not receive locationally relevant warnings. In addition, it is possible that commercial or other messages could be received on the phones of persons travelling through multiple countries, causing annoyance and confusion.

There are over 66,000 logical channels that can be used for cell broadcasting, with a subset being marked out by ITU-T for public warning purposes. The ITU process seeks to accommodate the interests of countries such as Sri Lanka and India where warnings need to be delivered in multiple languages. Currently, only Tanzania and the Arab Block appear to be actively engaged in the standards discussion. It is time others joined.

Of all the South Asian countries, it is best positioned to exploit the potential of cell broadcasting both for early warning and for commercial applications. In this light, LIRNEasia was pleased to be invited to conduct a scoping study on cell broadcasting for both public-service and commercial purposes by the Telecom Authority of the Maldives. As part of that activity, we organized, in collaboration with TAM, a workshop with the participation of Mark Wood (CEASa International) and Harsha Purasinghe (MicroImage), two people who have worked on implementing (not just talking about) cell broadcasting for the past few years.

Mark talked about the change in the environment for cell broadcasting following the US rule that any mobile device that was incapable of delivering public warning would have to be labeled as such and the greater enthusiasm displayed by the EU following the successful trials in the Netherlands. Harsha described the innovative work done by his team together with Dialog Telekom and the University of Moratuwa on developing DEWN. The commercial applications of cell broadcasting (location-based) services are also seen to be quite significant and attractive in and of themselves.

LIRNEasia was very pleased to see the high levels of enthusiasm among the participants and is confident that with timely follow through the Maldives can become the Asian leader in providing security to both its citizens and its guests through effective early warning.