On 3/9/19 2:04 PM, Sean Donelan wrote:
Cell phones have ATIS and 3GPP standard for emergency alerts. Cable set-top boxes have SCTE standards for emergency alerts. TVs with antennas have ATSC standards for emergency alerts. Analog radio still relies on broadcasters transmitting emergency alerts, i.e. that triple burst of modem noise.
Any reason the ISP has to be directly involved in this? The relevant government organization originating the alert could easily have a service to make that information available to the public via some standard API (maybe they do)? Does it have to be push and application-agnostic? Maybe that's (gasp) a reasonable application for Internet multicast. Operators could help, here, by making sure that particular application of Internet multicast actually works even if other applications don't, and governments originating alerts could help by making that straightforward. Is it sufficient for the streaming services to simply include this information in their streams? Heck, they could just include all of them and let the device that's accessing the stream figure out which ones are relevant. After all, it's the streaming service that knows the user is consuming content suitable for inclusion of emergency alerts. The network operator rarely knows this directly (though we're pretty good at inferring it).
ISPs are also part of that, since ISPs know where their subscribers are geographically located.
Do they? They know where the account is geographically located, but they don't necessarily know that the device consuming the media is located at the account address. Again, operators could help here by providing some sort of service to say "Where is my account located?", but many consumers of streaming media have far more accurate information based on mobile network geolocation information, Wi-Fi mapping, or outright GPS. I think the solution to this is perhaps maybe that network operators could "help" by building in some useful features to their network without explicitly supporting EAS or otherwise. After all, we (or at least most of us) already run pretty content- and application-neutral (and even -unaware) networks. Whether it's a good idea or even necessary to make those "helpful" features mandatory is perhaps a good question. At this stage, I'd probably lean toward no and see whether things resolve themselves on their own. The Internet, et. al., is pretty good at adapting to use cases like this without heavy-handed intervention it seems. -- Brandon Martin