First California AMBER Alert Shows AT&T's Emergency Alerts Are a Mess

Mark Gibbs writes "AT&T's implementation of the FCC's Emergency Alerts System provides minimally useful information in an untimely fashion with little geolocational relevance. ... Yesterday California got its first AMBER alert and my notification arrived at 10:54pm. It came up as panel over my lock screen and here's what it looked like on my notifications screen: 'Boulevard, CA AMBER Alert UPDATE: LIC/6WCU986 (CA) Blue Nissan Versa 4 door.' The problem with this it that's all there is! You can stab away at the message as much as you like but that's all you get, there's no link to any detail and considering the event it related to occurred over 240 miles away from me near to the Mexican border, the WEA service seems to be poorly implemented. Indeed, many Californians were annoyed and confused by the alert and according to the LA Times 'Some cellphones received only a text message, others buzzed and beeped. Some people got more than one alert.' I got a second copy of the alert at 2:22am and other subscribers reported not receiving any alert until late this morning." It seems to have gone down about as well as New York's.

Re:This is AT&T's fault how?

[Thanshin]

Well, you have to admit most of the damage was done by AT&AT.

The AT&ST could be beaten even by tiny bears with prehistoric technology.

Re:Seriously? Yes!

[venicebeach]

You're right, the Amber Alert would be much more useful if they provided the exact location of the vehicle.

Re:Don't blame AT&T for terse message

[thisisauniqueid]

90 bytes was the only unused space they had left in the wiretap-enable command packet.

Re:Are you KIDDING? (No pun intended... ok, a litt

[camperdave]

The parents of abducted children already know their kid is abducted. There's no point in alerting them.