Emergency broadcast messages resumed, C-DOT CEO says

The emergency cell broadcasting service (CBS) to send alerts to telecom users has “already resumed” for extreme weather events and natural disasters in India, the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT)’s CEO Rajkumar Upadhyay told The Hindu last month in an interview ahead of the organisation’s 43rd foundation day.

The system, developed by C-DOT and operated by State Disaster Management Agencies (SDMAs), had briefly been after a late-night alert was erroneously sent in central Delhi.

“One message has to reach every operator’s core and every kind of radio — Motorola, Siemens, ZTE, Huawei — and even within one vendor, a 2G version-1 radio differs from version-2,” Mr. Upadhyay said. “We wrote 300 to 350 adapters. It took us six months just to deliver one garbled message on MTNL — and when that garbled message came through, we were thrilled, because we knew we’d cracked the method.”